1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus

For the woman in the next-door office—
Cloudlessly, like everything else
—CCM
NATIVE AMERICA, 1491 A.D.
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Native America, 1491 A.D.
Native America, 1000 A.D.
Massachusett Alliance, 1600 A.D.
Peoples of the Dawnland, 1600 A.D.
Tawantinsuyu: Land of the Four Quarters, 1527 A.D.
Tawantinsuyu: Expansion of the Inka Empire, 1438–1527 A.D.
Triple Alliance, 1519 A.D.
Paleo-Indian Migration Routes: North America, 10,000 B.C.
Norte Chico: The Americas’ First Urban Complex, 3000–1800 B.C.
Mesoamerica, 1000 B.C.–1000 A.D.
Wari and Tiwanaku, 700 A.D.
Moundbuilders, 3400 B.C.–1400 A.D.
The American Bottom, 1300 A.D.
The Hundred Years’ War: Kaan and Mutal Battle to Control the Maya Heartland,
526–682 A.D.
Amazon Basin
Humanized Landscapes, 1491 A.D.
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The seeds of this book date back, at least in part, to 1983, when I wrote an article
for Science about a NASA program that was monitoring atmospheric ozone levels. In the
course of learning about the program, I flew with a research team in a NASA plane
equipped to sample and analyze the atmosphere at thirty thousand feet. At one point the
group landed in Mérida, in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. For some reason the scientists
had the next day off, and we all took a decrepit Volkswagen van to the Maya ruins of
Chichén Itzá. I knew nothing about Mesoamerican culture—I may not even have been
familiar with the term “Mesoamerica,” which encompasses the area from central Mexico
to Panama, including all of Guatemala and Belize, and parts of El Salvador, Honduras,
Costa Rica, and Nicaragua, the homeland of the Maya, the Olmec, and a host of other
indigenous groups. Moments after we clambered out of the van I was utterly enthralled.
On my own—sometimes for vacation, sometimes on assignment—I returned to
Yucatán five or six times, three times with my friend Peter Menzel, a photojournalist. For
a German magazine, Peter and I made a twelve-hour drive down a terrible dirt road
(thigh-deep potholes, blockades of fallen timber) to the then-unexcavated Maya
metropolis of Calakmul. Accompanying us was Juan de la Cruz Briceño, Maya himself,
caretaker of another, smaller ruin. Juan had spent twenty years as a chiclero, trekking the
forest for weeks on end in search of chicle trees, which have a gooey sap that Indians
have dried and chewed for millennia and that in the late nineteenth century became the
base of the chewing-gum industry. Around a night fire he told us about the ancient,
vine-shrouded cities he had stumbled across in his rambles, and his amazement when
scientists informed him that his ancestors had built them. That night we slept in
hammocks amid tall, headstone-like carvings that had not been read for more than a
thousand years.
My interest in the peoples who walked the Americas before Columbus only
snapped into anything resembling focus in the fall of 1992. By chance one Sunday
afternoon I came across a display in a college library of the special Columbian
quincentenary issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Curious,
I picked up the journal, sank into an armchair, and began to read an article by William
Denevan, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin. The article opened with the
question, “What was the New World like at the time of Columbus?” Yes, I thought, what
was it like? Who lived here and what could have passed through their minds when
European sails first appeared on the horizon? I finished Denevan’s article and went on to
others and didn’t stop reading until the librarian flicked the lights to signify closing time.
I didn’t know it then, but Denevan and a host of fellow researchers had spent their
careers trying to answer these questions. The picture they have emerged with is quite
different from what most Americans and Europeans think, and still little known outside
specialist circles.
A year or two after I read Denevan’s article, I attended a panel discussion at the
annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Called
something like “New Perspectives on the Amazon,” the session featured William Balée
of Tulane University. Balée’s talk was about “anthropogenic” forests—forests created by
Indians centuries or millennia in the past—a concept I’d never heard of before. He also
mentioned something that Denevan had discussed: many researchers now believe their
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predecessors underestimated the number of people in the Americas when Columbus
arrived. Indians were more numerous than previously thought, Balée said—much more
numerous. Gee, someone ought to put all this stuff together, I thought. It would make a
fascinating book.
I kept waiting for that book to appear. The wait grew more frustrating when my
son entered school and was taught the same things I had been taught, beliefs I knew had
long been sharply questioned. Since nobody else appeared to be writing the book, I
finally decided to try it myself. Besides, I was curious to learn more. The book you are
holding is the result.
Some things this book is not. It is not a systematic, chronological account of the
Western Hemisphere’s cultural and social development before 1492. Such a book, its
scope vast in space and time, could not be written—by the time the author approached the
end, new findings would have been made and the beginning would be outdated. Among
those who assured me of this were the very researchers who have spent much of the last
few decades wrestling with the staggering diversity of pre-Columbian societies.
Nor is this book a full intellectual history of the recent changes in perspective
among the anthropologists, archaeologists, ecologists, geographers, and historians who
study the first Americans. That, too, would be impossible, for the ramifications of the
new ideas are still rippling outward in too many directions for any writer to contain them
in one single work.
Instead, this book explores what I believe to be the three main foci of the new
findings: Indian demography (Part I), Indian origins (PartII), and Indian ecology (Part
III). Because so many different societies illustrate these points in such different ways, I
could not possibly be comprehensive. Instead, I chose my examples from cultures that are
among the best documented, or have drawn the most recent attention, or just seemed the
most intriguing.
Throughout this book, as the reader already will have noticed, I use the term
“Indian” to refer to the first inhabitants of the Americas. No question about it, Indian is a
confusing and historically inappropriate name. Probably the most accurate descriptor for
the original inhabitants of the Americas is Americans. Actually using it, though, would be
risking worse confusion. In this book I try to refer to people by the names they call
themselves. The overwhelming majority of the indigenous peoples whom I have met in
both North and South America describe themselves as Indians. (For more about
nomenclature, see Appendix A, “Loaded Words.”)
In the mid-1980s I traveled to the village of Hazelton, on the upper Skeena River
in the middle of British Columbia. Many of its inhabitants belong to the Gitksan (or
Gitxsan) nation. At the time of my visit, the Gitksan had just lodged a lawsuit with the
governments of both British Columbia and Canada. They wanted the province and the
nation to recognize that the Gitksan had lived there a long time, had never left, had never
agreed to give their land away, and had thus retained legal title to about eleven thousand
square miles of the province. They were very willing to negotiate, they said, but they
were not willing to not be negotiated with.
Flying in, I could see why the Gitksan were attached to the area. The plane swept
past the snowy, magnificent walls of the Rocher de Boule Mountains and into the
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confluence of two forested river valleys. Mist steamed off the land. People were fishing
in the rivers for steelhead and salmon even though they were 165 miles from the coast.
The Gitanmaax band of the Gitksan has its headquarters in Hazelton, but most
members live in a reserve just outside town. I drove to the reserve, where Neil Sterritt,
head of the Gitanmaax council, explained the litigation to me. A straightforward,
level-voiced man, he had got his start as a mining engineer and then come back home
with his shirtsleeves rolled up, ready for a lengthy bout of legal wrangling. After multiple
trials and appeals, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1997 that British Columbia had
to negotiate the status of the land with the Gitksan. Talks were still ongoing in 2005, two
decades after the lawsuit first began.
After a while Sterritt took me to see ‘Ksan, a historical park and art school created
in 1970. In the park were several re-created longhouses, their facades covered in the
forcefully elegant, black-and-red arcs of Northwest Coast Indian art. The art school
trained local Indians in the techniques of translating traditionally derived designs into
silk-screen prints. Sterritt left me in a back room of the schoolhouse and told me to look
around. There was more in the room than he may have realized, for I quickly found what
looked like storage boxes for a number of old and beautiful masks. Beside them was a
stack of modern prints, some of which used the same designs. And there were boxes of
photographs, old and new alike, many of splendid artworks.
In Northwest Coast art the subjects are flattened and distorted—it’s as if they’ve
been reduced from three dimensions to two and then folded like origami. At first I found
all the designs hard to interpret, but soon some seemed to pop right out of the surface.
They had clean lines that cut space into shapes at once simple and complex: objects
tucked into objects, creatures stuffed into their own eyes, humans who were half beast
and beasts who were half human—all was metamorphosis and surreal commotion.
A few of the objects I looked at I understood immediately, many I didn’t
understand at all, some I thought I understood but probably didn’t, and some maybe even
the Gitksan didn’t understand, in the way that most Europeans today can’t truly
understand the effect of Byzantine art on the spirits of the people who saw it at the time
of its creation. But I was delighted by the boldly graphic lines and dazzled by the sense
that I was peeking into a vibrant past that I had not known existed and that continued to
inform the present in a way I had not realized. For an hour or two I went from object to
object, always eager to see more. In assembling this book, I hope to share the excitement
I felt then, and have felt many times since.
6

INTRODUCTION
Holmberg’s Mistake
A View from Above
IN THE BENI
The plane took off in weather that was surprisingly cool for central Bolivia and
flew east, toward the Brazilian border. In a few minutes the roads and houses
disappeared, and the only traces of human settlement were the cattle scattered over the
savanna like sprinkles on ice cream. Then they, too, disappeared. By that time the
archaeologists had their cameras out and were clicking away in delight.
Below us lay the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and Indiana
put together, and nearly as flat. For almost half the year rain and snowmelt from the
mountains to the south and west cover the land with an irregular, slowly moving skin of
water that eventually ends up in the province’s northern rivers, which are upper
tributaries of the Amazon. The rest of the year the water dries up and the bright green
vastness turns into something that resembles a desert. This peculiar, remote, often watery
plain was what had drawn the researchers’ attention, and not just because it was one of
the few places on earth inhabited by some people who might never have seen Westerners
with cameras.
Clark Erickson and William Balée, the archaeologists, sat up front. Erickson,
based at the University of Pennsylvania, worked in concert with a Bolivian archaeologist,
who that day was elsewhere, freeing up a seat in the plane for me. Balée, of Tulane, is
actually an anthropologist, but as scientists have come to appreciate the ways in which
past and present inform each other, the distinction between anthropologists and
archaeologists has blurred. The two men differ in build, temperament, and scholarly
proclivity, but they pressed their faces to the windows with identical enthusiasm.
Scattered across the landscape below were countless islands of forest, many of
them almost-perfect circles—heaps of green in a sea of yellow grass. Each island rose as
much as sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that otherwise could not
endure the water. The forests were bridged by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and
up to three miles long. It is Erickson’s belief that this entire landscape—thirty thousand
square miles or more of forest islands and mounds linked by causeways—was
constructed by a technologically advanced, populous society more than a thousand years
ago. Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit
himself.
Erickson and Balée belong to a cohort of scholars that in recent years has
radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like
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efore Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians
came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about thirteen thousand years ago, that they
lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their
environment that even after millennia of habitation the continents remained mostly
wilderness. Schools still impart the same ideas today. One way to summarize the views of
people like Erickson and Balée would be to say that they regard this picture of Indian life
as wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought,
these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at
imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere
thoroughly marked by humankind.
Given the charged relations between white societies and native peoples, inquiry
into Indian culture and history is inevitably contentious. But the recent scholarship is
especially controversial. To begin with, some researchers—many but not all from an
older generation—deride the new theories as fantasies arising from an almost willful
misinterpretation of data and a perverse kind of political correctness. “I have seen no
evidence that large numbers of people ever lived in the Beni,” Betty J. Meggers, of the
Smithsonian Institution, told me. “Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking.” Indeed,
two Smithsonian-backed archaeologists from Argentina have argued that many of the
larger mounds are natural floodplain deposits; a “small initial population” could have
built the remaining causeways and raised fields in as little as a decade. Similar criticisms
apply to many of the new scholarly claims about Indians, according to Dean R. Snow, an
anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University. The problem is that “you can make the
meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record tell you anything you want,” he says.
“It’s really easy to kid yourself.” And some have charged that the claims advance the
political agenda of those who seek to discredit European culture, because the high
numbers seem to inflate the scale of native loss.
Disputes also arise because the new theories have implications for today’s
ecological battles. Much of the environmental movement is animated, consciously or not,
by what geographer William Denevan calls “the pristine myth”—the belief that the
Americas in 1491 were an almost untouched, even Edenic land, “untrammeled by man,”
in the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, a U.S. law that is one of the founding
documents of the global environmental movement. To green activists, as the University
of Wisconsin historian William Cronon has written, restoring this long-ago, putatively
natural state is a task that society is morally bound to undertake. Yet if the new view is
correct and the work of humankind was pervasive, where does that leave efforts to restore
nature?
The Beni is a case in point. In addition to building roads, causeways, canals,
dikes, reservoirs, mounds, raised agricultural fields, and possibly ball courts, Erickson
has argued, the Indians who lived there before Columbus trapped fish in the seasonally
flooded grassland. The trapping was not a matter of a few isolated natives with nets, but a
society-wide effort in which hundreds or thousands of people fashioned dense,
zigzagging networks of earthen fish weirs (fish-corralling fences) among the causeways.
Much of the savanna is natural, the result of seasonal flooding. But the Indians
maintained and expanded the grasslands by regularly setting huge areas on fire. Over the
centuries the burning created an intricate ecosystem of fire-adapted plant species
dependent on indigenous pyrophilia. The Beni’s current inhabitants still burn, although
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now it is mostly to maintain the savanna for cattle. When we flew over the region, the dry
season had just begun, but mile-long lines of flame were already on the march. Smoke
rose into the sky in great, juddering pillars. In the charred areas behind the fires were the
blackened spikes of trees, many of them of species that activists fight to save in other
parts of Amazonia.
The future of the Beni is uncertain, especially its most thinly settled region, near
the border with Brazil. Some outsiders want to develop the area for ranches, as has been
done with many U.S. grasslands. Others want to keep this sparsely populated region as
close to wilderness as possible. Local Indian groups regard this latter proposal with
suspicion. If the Beni becomes a reserve for the “natural,” they ask, what international
organization would let them continue setting the plains afire? Could any outside group
endorse large-scale burning in Amazonia? Instead, Indians propose placing control of the
land into their hands. Activists, in turn, regard that idea without enthusiasm—some
indigenous groups in the U.S. Southwest have promoted the use of their reservations as
repositories for nuclear waste. And, of course, there is all that burning.
HOLMBERG’S MISTAKE
“Don’t touch that tree,” Balée said.
I froze. I was climbing a low, crumbly hill and had been about to support myself
by grasping a scrawny, almost vine-like tree with splayed leaves. “Triplaris americana,”
said Balée, an expert in forest botany. “You have to watch out for it.” In an unusual
arrangement, he said, T. americana plays host to colonies of tiny red ants—indeed, it has
trouble surviving without them. The ants occupy minute tunnels just beneath the bark. In
return for shelter, the ants attack anything that touches the tree—insect, bird, unwary
writer. The venom-squirting ferocity of their attack gives rise to T. americana’s local
nickname: devil tree.
At the base of the devil tree, exposing its roots, was a deserted animal burrow.
Balée scraped out some dirt with a knife, then waved me over, along with Erickson and
my son Newell, who were accompanying us. The depression was thick with busted
pottery. We could see the rims of plates and what looked like the foot of a teakettle—it
was shaped like a human foot, complete with painted toenails. Balée plucked out half a
dozen pieces of ceramic: shards of pots and plates, a chipped length of cylindrical bar that
may have been part of a pot’s support leg. As much as an eighth of the hill, by volume,
was composed of such fragments, he said. You could dig almost anywhere on it and see
the like. We were clambering up an immense pile of broken crockery.
The pile is known as Ibibate, at fifty-nine feet one of the tallest known forested
mounds in the Beni. Erickson explained to me that the pieces of ceramic were probably
intended to help build up and aerate the muddy soil for settlement and agriculture. But
though this explanation makes sense on engineering grounds, he said, it doesn’t make the
long-ago actions of the moundbuilders any less mysterious. The mounds cover such an
enormous area that they seem unlikely to be the byproduct of waste. Monte Testaccio, the
hill of broken pots southeast of Rome, was a garbage dump for the entire imperial city.
Ibibate is larger than Monte Testaccio and but one of hundreds of similar mounds. Surely
the Beni did not generate more waste than Rome—the ceramics in Ibibate, Erickson
argues, indicate that large numbers of people, many of them skilled laborers, lived for a
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long time on these mounds, feasting and drinking exuberantly all the while. The number
of potters necessary to make the heaps of crockery, the time required for labor, the
number of people needed to provide food and shelter for the potters, the organization of
large-scale destruction and burial—all of it is evidence, to Erickson’s way of thinking,
that a thousand years ago the Beni was the site of a highly structured society, one that
through archaeological investigation was just beginning to come into view.
Accompanying us that day were two Sirionó Indians, Chiro Cuéllar and his
son-in-law Rafael. The two men were wiry, dark, and nearly beardless; walking beside
them on the trail, I had noticed small nicks in their earlobes. Rafael, cheerful almost to
bumptiousness, peppered the afternoon with comments; Chiro, a local figure of authority,
smoked locally made “Marlboro” cigarettes and observed our progress with an
expression of amused tolerance. They lived about a mile away, in a little village at the
end of a long, rutted dirt road. We had driven there earlier in the day, parking in the shade
of a tumbledown school and some old missionary buildings. The structures were
clustered near the top of a small hill—another ancient mound. While Newell and I waited
by the truck, Erickson and Balée went inside the school to obtain permission from Chiro
and the other members of the village council to tramp around. Noticing that we were idle,
a couple of Sirionó kids tried to persuade Newell and me to look at a young jaguar in a
pen, and to give them money for this thrill. After a few minutes, Erickson and Balée
emerged with the requisite permission—and two chaperones, Chiro and Rafael. Now,
climbing up Ibibate, Chiro observed that I was standing by the devil tree. Keeping his
expression deadpan, he suggested that I climb it. Up top, he said, I would find some
delicious jungle fruit. “It will be like nothing you have experienced before,” he promised.
From the top of Ibibate we were able to see the surrounding savanna. Perhaps a
quarter mile away, across a stretch of yellow, waist-high grass, was a straight line of
trees—an ancient raised causeway, Erickson said. Otherwise the countryside was so flat
that we could see for miles in every direction—or, rather, we could have seen for miles, if
the air in some directions had not been filled with smoke.
Afterward I wondered about the relationship of our escorts to this place. Were the
Sirionó like contemporary Italians living among the monuments of the Roman Empire? I
asked Erickson and Balée that question during the drive back.
Their answer continued sporadically through the rest of the evening, as we rode to
our lodgings in an unseasonable cold rain and then had dinner. In the 1970s, they said,
most authorities would have answered my question about the Sirionó in one way. Today
most would answer it in another, different way. The difference involves what I came to
think of, rather unfairly, as Holmberg’s Mistake.
Although the Sirionó are but one of a score of Native American groups in the
Beni, they are the best known. Between 1940 and 1942 a young doctoral student named
Allan R. Holmberg lived among them. He published his account of their lives, Nomads of
the Longbow, in 1950. (The title refers to the six-foot bows the Sirionó use for hunting.)
Quickly recognized as a classic, Nomads remains an iconic and influential text; as filtered
through countless other scholarly articles and the popular press, it became one of the
main sources for the outside world’s image of South American Indians.
The Sirionó, Holmberg reported, were “among the most culturally backward
peoples of the world.” Living in constant want and hunger, he said, they had no clothes,
no domestic animals, no musical instruments (not even rattles and drums), no art or
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design (except necklaces of animal teeth), and almost no religion (the Sirionó
“conception of the universe” was “almost completely uncrystallized”). Incredibly, they
could not count beyond three or make fire (they carried it, he wrote, “from camp to camp
in a [burning] brand”). Their poor lean-tos, made of haphazardly heaped palm fronds,
were so ineffective against rain and insects that the typical band member “undergoes
many a sleepless night during the year.” Crouched over meager campfires during the wet,
buggy nights, the Sirionó were living exemplars of primitive humankind—the
“quintessence” of “man in the raw state of nature,” as Holmberg put it. For millennia, he
thought, they had existed almost without change in a landscape unmarked by their
presence. Then they encountered European society and for the first time their history
acquired a narrative flow.
Holmberg was a careful and compassionate researcher whose detailed
observations of Sirionó life remain valuable today. And he bravely surmounted trials in
Bolivia that would have caused many others to give up. During his months in the field he
was always uncomfortable, usually hungry, and often sick. Blinded by an infection in
both eyes, he walked for days through the forest to a clinic, holding the hand of a Sirionó
guide. He never fully recovered his health. After his return, he became head of the
anthropology department at Cornell University, from which position he led its celebrated
efforts to alleviate poverty in the Andes.
Nonetheless, he was wrong about the Sirionó. And he was wrong about the Beni,
the place they inhabited—wrong in a way that is instructive, even exemplary.
Before Columbus, Holmberg believed, both the people and the land had no real
history. Stated so baldly, this notion—that the indigenous peoples of the Americas floated
changelessly through the millennia until 1492—may seem ludicrous. But flaws in
perspective often appear obvious only after they are pointed out. In this case they took
decades to rectify.
The Bolivian government’s instability and fits of anti-American and
anti-European rhetoric ensured that few foreign anthropologists and archaeologists
followed Holmberg into the Beni. Not only was the government hostile, the region, a
center of the cocaine trade in the 1970s and 1980s, was dangerous. Today there is less
drug trafficking, but smugglers’ runways can still be seen, cut into remote patches of
forest. The wreck of a crashed drug plane sits not far from the airport in Trinidad, the
biggest town in the province. During the drug wars “the Beni was neglected, even by
Bolivian standards,” according to Robert Langstroth, a geographer and range ecologist in
Wisconsin who did his dissertation fieldwork there. “It was a backwater of a backwater.”
Gradually a small number of scientists ventured into the region. What they learned
transformed their understanding of the place and its people.
Just as Holmberg believed, the Sirionó were among the most culturally
impoverished people on earth. But this was not because they were unchanged holdovers
from humankind’s ancient past but because smallpox and influenza laid waste to their
villages in the 1920s. Before the epidemics at least three thousand Sirionó, and probably
many more, lived in eastern Bolivia. By Holmberg’s time fewer than 150 remained—a
loss of more than 95 percent in less than a generation. So catastrophic was the decline
that the Sirionó passed through a genetic bottleneck. (A genetic bottleneck occurs when a
population becomes so small that individuals are forced to mate with relatives, which can
produce deleterious hereditary effects.) The effects of the bottleneck were described in
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1982, when Allyn Stearman of the University of Central Florida became the first
anthropologist to visit the Sirionó since Holmberg. Stearman discovered that the Sirionó
were thirty times more likely to be born with clubfeet than typical human populations.
And almost all the Sirionó had unusual nicks in their earlobes, the traits I had noticed on
the two men accompanying us.
Even as the epidemics hit, Stearman learned, the group was fighting the white
cattle ranchers who were taking over the region. The Bolivian military aided the
incursion by hunting down the Sirionó and throwing them into what were, in effect,
prison camps. Those released from confinement were forced into servitude on the
ranches. The wandering people Holmberg traveled with in the forest had been hiding
from their abusers. At some risk to himself, Holmberg tried to help them, but he never
fully grasped that the people he saw as remnants from the Paleolithic Age were actually
the persecuted survivors of a recently shattered culture. It was as if he had come across
refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and concluded that they belonged to a culture
that had always been barefoot and starving.
Far from being leftovers from the Stone Age, in fact, the Sirionó are probably
relative newcomers to the Beni. They speak a language in the Tupí-Guaraní group, one of
the most important Indian language families in South America but one not common in
Bolivia. Linguistic evidence, first weighed by anthropologists in the 1970s, suggests that
they arrived from the north as late as the seventeenth century, about the time of the first
Spanish settlers and missionaries. Other evidence suggests they may have come a few
centuries earlier; Tupí-Guaraní–speaking groups, possibly including the Sirionó, attacked
the Inka empire in the early sixteenth century. No one knows why the Sirionó moved in,
but one reason may be simply that the Beni then was little populated. Not long before, the
previous inhabitants’ society had disintegrated.
To judge by Nomads of the Longbow, Holmberg did not know of this earlier
culture—the culture that built the causeways and mounds and fish weirs. He didn’t see
that the Sirionó were walking through a landscape that had been shaped by somebody
else. A few European observers before Holmberg had remarked upon the earthworks’
existence, though some doubted that the causeways and forest islands were of human
origin. But they did not draw systematic scholarly attention until 1961, when William
Denevan came to Bolivia. Then a doctoral student, he had learned of the region’s peculiar
landscape during an earlier stint as a cub reporter in Peru and thought it might make an
interesting topic for his thesis. Upon arrival he discovered that oil-company geologists,
the only scientists in the area, believed the Beni was thick with the remains of an
unknown civilization.
Convincing a local pilot to push his usual route westward, Denevan examined the
Beni from above. He observed exactly what I saw four decades later: isolated hillocks of
forest; long raised berms; canals; raised agricultural fields; circular, moat-like ditches;
and odd, zigzagging ridges. “I’m looking out of one of these DC-3 windows, and I’m
going berserk in this little airplane,” Denevan said to me. “I knew these things were not
natural. You just don’t have that kind of straight line in nature.” As Denevan learned
more about the landscape, his amazement grew. “It’s a completely humanized
landscape,” he said. “To me, it was clearly the most exciting thing going on in the
Amazon and adjacent areas. It may be the most important thing in all of South America, I
think. Yet it was practically untouched” by scientists. It is still almost untouched—there
12

aren’t even any detailed maps of the earthworks and canals.
Beginning as much as three thousand years ago, this long-ago society—Erickson
believes it was probably founded by the ancestors of an Arawak-speaking people now
called the Mojo and the Bauré—created one of the largest, strangest, and most
ecologically rich artificial environments on the planet. These people built up the mounds
for homes and farms, constructed the causeways and canals for transportation and
communication, created the fish weirs to feed themselves, and burned the savannas to
keep them clear of invading trees. A thousand years ago their society was at its height.
Their villages and towns were spacious, formal, and guarded by moats and palisades. In
Erickson’s hypothetical reconstruction, as many as a million people may have walked the
causeways of eastern Bolivia in their long cotton tunics, heavy ornaments dangling from
their wrists and necks.
13

Flying over eastern Bolivia in the early 1960s, the young geographer William
Denevan was amazed to see that the landscape (bottom)—home to nothing but cattle
ranches for generations—still bore evidence that it had once been inhabited by a large,
prosperous society, one whose very existence had been forgotten. Incredibly, such
discoveries are still being made. In 2002 and 2003, Finnish and Brazilian researchers
revealed the remains of dozens of geometrical earthworks (top) in the western Brazilian
state of Acre where the forest had just been cleared for cattle ranches.
Today, hundreds of years after this Arawak culture passed from the scene, the
forest on and around Ibibate mound looks like the classic Amazon of conservationists’
dreams: lianas thick as a human arm, dangling blade-like leaves more than six feet long,
smooth-boled Brazil nut trees, thick-bodied flowers that smell like warm meat. In terms
of species richness, Balée told me, the forest islands of Bolivia are comparable to any
place in South America. The same is true of the Beni savanna, it seems, with its different
complement of species. Ecologically, the region is a treasure, but one designed and
executed by human beings. Erickson regards the landscape of the Beni as one of
humankind’s greatest works of art, a masterpiece that until recently was almost
completely unknown, a masterpiece in a place with a name that few people outside
Bolivia would recognize.
“EMPTY OF MANKIND AND ITS WORKS”
The Beni was no anomaly. For almost five centuries, Holmberg’s Mistake—the
supposition that Native Americans lived in an eternal, unhistoried state—held sway in
scholarly work, and from there fanned out to high school textbooks, Hollywood movies,
newspaper articles, environmental campaigns, romantic adventure books, and
silk-screened T-shirts. It existed in many forms and was embraced both by those who
hated Indians and those who admired them. Holmberg’s Mistake explained the colonists’
view of most Indians as incurably vicious barbarians; its mirror image was the dreamy
stereotype of the Indian as a Noble Savage. Positive or negative, in both images Indians
lacked what social scientists call agency—they were not actors in their own right, but
passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way.
The Noble Savage dates back as far as the first full-blown ethnography of
American indigenous peoples, Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Apologética Historia Sumaria,
written mainly in the 1530s. Las Casas, a conquistador who repented of his actions and
became a priest, spent the second half of his long life opposing European cruelty in the
Americas. To his way of thinking, Indians were natural creatures who dwelt, gentle as
cows, in the “terrestrial paradise.” In their prelapsarian innocence, he believed, they had
been quietly waiting—waiting for millennia—for Christian instruction. Las Casas’s
contemporary, the Italian commentator Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, shared these views.
Indians, he wrote (I quote the English translation from 1556), “lyve in that goulden world
of whiche owlde writers speake so much,” existing “simplye and innocentlye without
inforcement of lawes.”
In our day, beliefs about Indians’ inherent simplicity and innocence refer mainly
to their putative lack of impact on the environment. This notion dates back at least to
Henry David Thoreau, who spent much time seeking “Indian wisdom,” an indigenous
14

way of thought that supposedly did not encompass measuring or categorizing, which he
viewed as the evils that allowed human beings to change Nature. Thoreau’s ideas
continue to be influential. In the wake of the first Earth Day in 1970, a group named
Keep America Beautiful, Inc., put up billboards that portrayed an actor in Indian dress
quietly weeping over polluted land. The campaign was enormously successful. For
almost a decade the image of the crying Indian appeared around the world. Yet though
Indians here were playing a heroic role, the advertisement still embodied Holmberg’s
Mistake, for it implicitly depicted Indians as people who never changed their
environment from its original wild state. Because history is change, they were people
without history.
Las Casas’s anti-Spanish views met with such harsh attacks that he instructed his
executors to publish the Apologética Historia forty years after his death (he died in
1566). In fact, the book did not appear in complete form until 1909. As the delay
suggests, polemics for the Noble Savage tended to meet with little sympathy in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Emblematic was the U.S. historian George Bancroft,
dean of his profession, who argued in 1834 that before Europeans arrived North America
was “an unproductive waste…Its only inhabitants were a few scattered tribes of feeble
barbarians, destitute of commerce and of political connection.” Like Las Casas, Bancroft
believed that Indians had existed in societies without change—except that Bancroft
regarded this timelessness as an indication of sloth, not innocence.
In different forms Bancroft’s characterization was carried into the next century.
Writing in 1934, Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the founders of American anthropology,
theorized that the Indians in eastern North America could not develop—could have no
history—because their lives consisted of “warfare that was insane, unending,
continuously attritional.” Escaping the cycle of conflict was “well-nigh impossible,” he
believed. “The group that tried to shift its values from war to peace was almost certainly
doomed to early extinction.”
*1 Kroeber conceded that Indians took time out from
fighting to grow crops, but insisted that agriculture “was not basic to life in the East; it
was an auxiliary, in a sense a luxury.” As a result, “Ninety-nine per cent or more of what
[land] might have been developed remained virgin.”
Four decades later, Samuel Eliot Morison, twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, closed
his two-volume European Discovery of America with the succinct claim that Indians had
created no lasting monuments or institutions. Imprisoned in changeless wilderness, they
were “pagans expecting short and brutish lives, void of any hope for the future.” Native
people’s “chief function in history,” the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Baron
Dacre of Glanton, proclaimed in 1965, “is to show to the present an image of the past
from which by history it has escaped.”
Textbooks reflected academic beliefs faithfully. In a survey of U.S. history
schoolbooks, the writer Frances Fitzgerald concluded that the characterization of Indians
had moved, “if anything, resolutely backward” between the 1840s and the 1940s. Earlier
writers thought of Indians as important, though uncivilized, but later books froze them
into a formula: “lazy, childlike, and cruel.” A main textbook of the 1940s devoted only a
“few paragraphs” to Indians, she wrote, “of which the last is headed ‘The Indians Were
Backward.’”
These views, though less common today, continue to appear. The 1987 edition of
American History: A Survey, a standard high school textbook by three well-known
15

historians, summed up Indian history thusly: “For thousands of centuries—centuries in
which human races were evolving, forming communities, and building the beginnings of
national civilizations in Africa, Asia, and Europe—the continents we know as the
Americas stood empty of mankind and its works.” The story of Europeans in the New
World, the book informed students, “is the story of the creation of a civilization where
none existed.”
It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived
in the past. Alfred W. Crosby, a University of Texas historian, noted that many of the
researchers who embraced Holmberg’s Mistake lived in an era when the driving force of
events seemed to be great leaders of European descent and when white societies appeared
to be overwhelming nonwhite societies everywhere. Throughout all of the nineteenth and
much of the twentieth century, nationalism was ascendant, and historians identified
history with nations, rather than with cultures, religions, or ways of life. But the Second
World War taught the West that non-Westerners—the Japanese, in this instance—were
capable of swift societal change. The rapid disintegration of European colonial empires
further adumbrated the point. Crosby likened the effects of these events on social
scientists to those on astronomers from “the discovery that the faint smudges seen
between stars on the Milky Way were really distant galaxies.”
Meanwhile, new disciplines and new technologies were creating new ways to
examine the past. Demography, climatology, epidemiology, economics, botany, and
palynology (pollen analysis); molecular and evolutionary biology; carbon-14 dating,
ice-core sampling, satellite photography, and soil assays; genetic microsatellite analysis
and virtual 3-D fly-throughs—a torrent of novel perspectives and techniques cascaded
into use. And when these were employed, the idea that the only human occupants of
one-third of the earth’s surface had changed little for thousands of years began to seem
implausible. To be sure, some researchers have vigorously attacked the new findings as
wild exaggerations. (“We have simply replaced the old myth [of untouched wilderness]
with a new one,” scoffed geographer Thomas Vale, “the myth of the humanized
landscape.”) But after several decades of discovery and debate, a new picture of the
Americas and their original inhabitants is emerging.
Advertisements still celebrate nomadic, ecologically pure Indians on horseback
chasing bison in the Great Plains of North America, but at the time of Columbus the great
majority of Native Americans could be found south of the Río Grande. They were not
nomadic, but built up and lived in some of the world’s biggest and most opulent cities.
Far from being dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms. Others
subsisted on fish and shellfish. As for the horses, they were from Europe; except for
llamas in the Andes, the Western Hemisphere had no beasts of burden. In other words,
the Americas were immeasurably busier, more diverse, and more populous than
researchers had previously imagined.
And older, too.
THE OTHER NEOLITHIC REVOLUTIONS
For much of the last century archaeologists believed that Indians came to the
Americas through the Bering Strait about thirteen thousand years ago at the tail end of the
last Ice Age. Because the sheets of polar ice locked up huge amounts of water, sea levels
16

around the world fell about three hundred feet. The shallow Bering Strait became a wide
land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. In theory, paleo-Indians, as they are called,
simply walked across the fifty-five miles that now separate the continents. C. Vance
Haynes, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, put the crowning touches on the
scheme in 1964, when he noted evidence that at just the right time—that is, about thirteen
thousand years ago—two great glacial sheets in northwest Canada parted, leaving a
comparatively warm, ice-free corridor between them. Down this channel paleo-Indians
could have passed from Alaska to the more habitable regions in the south without having
to hike over the ice pack. At the time, the ice pack extended two thousand miles south of
the Bering Strait and was almost devoid of life. Without Haynes’s ice-free corridor, it is
hard to imagine how humans could have made it to the south. The combination of land
bridge and ice-free corridor occurred only once in the last twenty thousand years, and
lasted for just a few hundred years. And it happened just before the emergence of what
was then the earliest known culture in the Americas, the Clovis culture, so named for the
town in New Mexico where its remains were first definitely observed. Haynes’s
exposition made the theory seem so ironclad that it fairly flew into the textbooks. I
learned it when I attended high school. So did my son, thirty years later.
In 1997 the theory abruptly came unglued. Some of its most ardent partisans,
Haynes among them, publicly conceded that an archaeological dig in southern Chile had
turned up compelling evidence of human habitation more than twelve thousand years
ago. And because these people lived seven thousand miles south of the Bering Strait, a
distance that presumably would have taken a long time to traverse, they almost certainly
arrived before the ice-free corridor opened up. (In any case, new research had cast doubt
on the existence of that corridor.) Given the near impossibility of surpassing the glaciers
without the corridor, some archaeologists suggested that the first Americans must have
arrived twenty thousand years ago, when the ice pack was smaller. Or even earlier than
that—the Chilean site had suggestive evidence of artifacts more than thirty thousand
years old. Or perhaps the first Indians traveled by boat, and didn’t need the land bridge.
Or maybe they arrived via Australia, passing the South Pole. “We’re in a state of
turmoil,” the consulting archaeologist Stuart Fiedel told me. “Everything we knew is now
supposed to be wrong,” he added, exaggerating a little for effect.
No consensus has emerged, but a growing number of researchers believe that the
New World was occupied by a single small group that crossed the Bering Strait, got stuck
on the Alaska side, and straggled to the rest of the Americas in two or three separate
groups, with the ancestors of most modern Indians making up the second group.
Researchers differ on the details; some scientists have theorized that the Americas may
have been hit with as many as five waves of settlement before Columbus, with the
earliest occurring as much as fifty thousand years ago. In most versions, though, today’s
Indians are seen as relative latecomers.
Indian activists dislike this line of reasoning. “I can’t tell you how many white
people have told me that ‘science’ shows that Indians were just a bunch of interlopers,”
Vine Deloria Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said to me.
Deloria is the author of many books, including Red Earth, White Lies, a critique of
mainstream archaeology. The book’s general tenor is signaled by its index; under
“science,” the entries include “corruption and fraud and,” “Indian explanations ignored
by,” “lack of proof for theories of,” “myth of objectivity of,” and “racism of.” In
17

Deloria’s opinion, archaeology is mainly about easing white guilt. Determining that
Indians superseded other people fits neatly into this plan. “If we’re only thieves who stole
our land from someone else,” Deloria said, “then they can say, ‘Well, we’re just the
same. We’re all immigrants here, aren’t we?’”
The moral logic of the we’re-all-immigrants argument that Deloria cites is
difficult to parse; it seems to be claiming that two wrongs make a right. Moreover, there’s
no evidence that the first “wrong” was a wrong—nothing is known about the contacts
among the various waves of paleo-Indian migration. But in any case whether most of
today’s Native Americans actually arrived first or second is irrelevant to an assessment of
their cultural achievements. In every imaginable scenario, they left Eurasia before the
first whisper of the Neolithic Revolution.
The Neolithic Revolution is the invention of farming, an event whose significance
can hardly be overstated. “The human career,” wrote the historian Ronald Wright,
“divides in two: everything before the Neolithic Revolution and everything after it.” It
began in the Middle East about eleven thousand years ago. In the next few millennia the
wheel and the metal tool sprang up in the same area. The Sumerians put these inventions
together, added writing, and in the third millennium B.C. created the first great
civilization. Every European and Asian culture since, no matter how disparate in
appearance, stands in Sumer’s shadow. Native Americans, who left Asia long before
agriculture, missed out on the bounty. “They had to do everything on their own,” Crosby
said to me. Remarkably, they succeeded.
Researchers have long known that a second, independent Neolithic Revolution
occurred in Mesoamerica. The exact timing is uncertain—archaeologists keep pushing
back the date—but it is now thought to have occurred about ten thousand years ago, not
long after the Middle East’s Neolithic Revolution. In 2003, though, archaeologists
discovered ancient seeds from cultivated squashes in coastal Ecuador, at the foot of the
Andes, which may be older than any agricultural remains in Mesoamerica—a third
Neolithic Revolution. This Neolithic Revolution probably led, among many other things,
to the cultures in the Beni. The two American Neolithics spread more slowly than their
counterpart in Eurasia, possibly because Indians in many places had not had the time to
build up the requisite population density, and possibly because of the extraordinary
*2
nature of the most prominent Indian crop, maize.
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated
descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine
how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can’t reproduce itself, because its
kernels are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some
other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic
relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different—for one thing,
its “ears” are smaller than the baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats
teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern
maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that
archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled
with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one
arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent. (Andean
agriculture, based on potatoes and beans, and Amazonian agriculture, based on manioc
[cassava], had wide impact but on a global level were less important than maize.)
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About seven thousand years elapsed between the dawn of the Middle Eastern
Neolithic and the establishment of Sumer. Indians navigated the same path in somewhat
less time (the data are too sketchy to be more precise). Pride of place must go to the
Olmec, the first technologically complex culture in the hemisphere. Appearing in the
narrow “waist” of Mexico about 1800 B.C., they lived in cities and towns centered on
temple mounds. Strewn among them were colossal male heads of stone, many six feet tall
or more, with helmet-like headgear, perpetual frowns, and somewhat African features,
the last of which has given rise to speculation that Olmec culture was inspired by
voyagers from Africa. The Olmec were but the first of many societies that arose in
Mesoamerica in this epoch. Most had religions that focused on human sacrifice, dark by
contemporary standards, but their economic and scientific accomplishments were bright.
They invented a dozen different systems of writing, established widespread trade
networks, tracked the orbits of the planets, created a 365-day calendar (more accurate
than its contemporaries in Europe), and recorded their histories in accordion-folded
“books” of fig tree bark paper.
Arguably their greatest intellectual feat was the invention of zero. In his classic
account Number: The Language of Science, the mathematician Tobias Dantzig called the
discovery of zero “one of the greatest single accomplishments of the human race,” a
“turning point” in mathematics, science, and technology. The first whisper of zero in the
Middle East occurred about 600 B.C. When tallying numbers, the Babylonians arranged
them into columns, as children learn to do today. To distinguish between their
equivalents to 11 and 101, they placed two triangular marks between the digits: 1
1, so to speak. (Because Babylonian mathematics was based on 60, rather than 10, the
example is correct only in principle.) Curiously, though, they did not use the symbol to
distinguish among their versions of 1, 10, and 100. Nor could the Babylonians add or
subtract with zero, let alone use zero to enter the realm of negative numbers.
Mathematicians in India first used zero in its contemporary sense—a number, not a
placeholder—sometime in the first few centuries A.D. It didn’t appear in Europe until the
twelfth century, when it came in with the Arabic numerals we use today (fearing fraud,
some European governments banned the new numbers). Meanwhile, the first recorded
zero in the Americas occurred in a Maya carving from 357 A.D., possibly before the
Sanskrit. And there are monuments from before the birth of Christ that do not bear zeroes
themselves but are inscribed with dates in a calendrical system based on the existence of
zero.
Does this mean that the Maya were then more advanced than their counterparts in,
say, Europe? Social scientists flinch at this question, and with good reason. The Olmec,
Maya, and other Mesoamerican societies were world pioneers in mathematics and
astronomy—but they did not use the wheel. Amazingly, they had invented the wheel but
did not employ it for any purpose other than children’s toys. Those looking for a tale of
cultural superiority can find it in zero; those looking for failure can find it in the wheel.
Neither line of argument is useful, though. What is most important is that by 1000 A.D.
Indians had expanded their Neolithic revolutions to create a panoply of diverse
civilizations across the hemisphere.
Five hundred years later, when Columbus sailed into the Caribbean, the
descendants of the world’s Neolithic Revolutions collided, with overwhelming
consequences for all.
19

A GUIDED TOUR
Imagine, for a moment, an impossible journey: taking off in a plane from eastern
Bolivia as I did, but doing so in 1000 A.D. and flying a surveillance mission over the rest
of the Western Hemisphere. What would be visible from the windows? Fifty years ago,
most historians would have given a simple answer to this question: two continents of
wilderness, populated by scattered bands whose ways of life had changed little since the
Ice Age. The sole exceptions would have been Mexico and Peru, where the Maya and the
ancestors of the Inka were crawling toward the foothills of Civilization.
Today our understanding is different in almost every perspective. Picture the
millennial plane flying west, from the lowlands of the Beni to the heights of the Andes.
On the ground beneath as the journey begins are the causeways and canals one sees
today, except that they are now in good repair and full of people. (Fifty years ago, the
earthworks were almost completely unknown, even to those living nearby.) After a few
hundred miles the plane ascends to the mountains—and again the historical picture has
changed. Until recently, researchers would have said the highlands in 1000 A.D. were
occupied by scattered small villages and one or two big towns with some nice stonework.
But recent archaeological investigations have revealed that at this time the Andes housed
two mountain states, each much larger than previously appreciated.
The state closest to the Beni was based around Lake Titicaca, the 120-mile-long
alpine lake that crosses the Peru-Bolivia border. Most of this region has an altitude of
twelve thousand feet or more. Summers are short; winters are correspondingly long. This
“bleak, frigid land,” wrote the adventurer Victor von Hagen, “seemingly was the last
place from which one might expect a culture to develop.” But in fact the lake is
comparatively warm, and so the land surrounding it is less beaten by frost than the
surrounding highlands. Taking advantage of the better climate, the village of Tiwanaku,
one of many settlements around the lake, began after about 800 B.C. to drain the
wetlands around the rivers that flowed into the lake from the south. A thousand years
later the village had grown to become the center of a large polity, also known as
Tiwanaku.
20

NATIVE AMERICA, 1000 A.D.
Less a centralized state than a clutch of municipalities under the common
religio-cultural sway of the center, Tiwanaku took advantage of the extreme ecological
differences among the Pacific coast, the rugged mountains, and the altiplano (the high
plains) to create a dense web of exchange: fish from the sea; llamas from the altiplano;
fruits, vegetables, and grains from the fields around the lake. Flush with wealth,
Tiwanaku city swelled into a marvel of terraced pyramids and grand monuments. Stone
breakwaters extended far out into Lake Titicaca, thronged with long-prowed boats made
of reeds. With its running water, closed sewers, and gaudily painted walls, Tiwanaku was
among the world’s most impressive cities.
21

University of Chicago archaeologist Alan L. Kolata excavated at Tiwanaku
during the 1980s and early 1990s. He has written that by 1000 A.D. the city had a
population of as much as 115,000, with another quarter million in the surrounding
countryside—numbers that Paris would not reach for another five centuries. The
comparison seems fitting; at the time, the realm of Tiwanaku was about the size of
modern France. Other researchers believe this population estimate is too high. Twenty or
thirty thousand in the central city is more likely, according to Nicole Couture, a
University of Chicago archaeologist who helped edit the definitive publication of
Kolata’s work in 2003. An equal number, she said, occupied the surrounding countryside.
Which view is right? Although Couture was confident of her ideas, she thought it
would be “another decade” before the matter was settled. And in any case the exact
number does not affect what she regards as the key point. “Building this enormous place
up here is really remarkable,” she said. “I realize that again every time I come back.”
North and west of Tiwanaku, in what is now southern Peru, was the rival state of
Wari, which then ran for almost a thousand miles along the spine of the Andes. More
tightly organized and military minded than Tiwanaku, the rulers of Wari stamped out
cookie-cutter fortresses and stationed them all along their borders. The capital
city—called, eponymously, Wari—was in the heights, near the modern city of Ayacucho.
Housing perhaps seventy thousand souls, Wari was a dense, alley-packed craze of
walled-off temples, hidden courtyards, royal tombs, and apartments up to six stories tall.
Most of the buildings were sheathed in white plaster, making the city sparkle in the
mountain sun.
In 1000 A.D., at the time of our imaginary overflight, both societies were reeling
from a succession of terrible droughts. Perhaps eighty years earlier, dust storms had
engulfed the high plains, blackening the glaciers in the peaks above. (Ice samples, dug
out in the 1990s, suggest the assault.) Then came a run of punishing dry spells, many
more than a decade in duration, interrupted by gigantic floods. (Sediment and tree-ring
records depict the sequence.) The disaster’s cause is still in dispute, but some
climatologists believe that the Pacific is subject to “mega-Niño events,” murderously
strong versions of the well-known El Niño patterns that play havoc with American
weather today. Mega-Niños occurred every few centuries between 200 and 1600 A.D. In
1925 and 1926, a strong El Niño—not a mega-Niño, but one that was bigger than
usual—blasted Amazonia with so much dry heat that sudden fires killed hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of people in the forest. Rivers dried up, their bottoms carpeted with
dead fish. A mega-Niño in the eleventh century may well have caused the droughts of
those years. But whatever the cause of the climatic upheaval, it severely tested Wari and
Tiwanaku society.
Here, though, one must be careful. Europe was racked by a “little ice age” of
extreme cold between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet historians rarely
attribute the rise and fall of European states in that period to climate change. Fierce
winters helped drive the Vikings from Greenland and led to bad harvests that exacerbated
social tensions in continental Europe, but few would claim that the little ice age caused
the Reformation. Similarly, the mega-Niños were but one of many stresses on Andean
civilizations at the time, stresses that in their totality neither Wari nor Tiwanaku had the
political resources to survive. Soon after 1000 A.D. Tiwanaku split into flinders that
would not be united for another four centuries, when the Inka swept them up. Wari also
22

fell. It was succeeded and perhaps taken over by a state called Chimor, which oversaw an
empire that sprawled over central Peru until it, too, was absorbed by the Inka.
Such newly discovered histories appear everywhere in the Americas. Take the
plane north, toward Central America and southern Mexico, into the bulge of the Yucatán
Peninsula, homeland of the Maya. Maya ruins were well known forty years ago, to be
sure, but among them, too, many new things have been discovered. Consider Calakmul,
the ruin that Peter Menzel and I visited in the early 1980s. Almost wholly unexcavated
since its discovery, the Calakmul we came to lay swathed in dry, scrubby vegetation that
crawled like a swarm of thorns up its two huge pyramids. When Peter and I spoke to
William J. Folan of the Universidad Autónoma de Campeche, who was just beginning to
work at the city, he recommended that we not try going to the ruin unless we could rent a
heavy truck, and not even to try with the truck if it had rained. Our visit to Calakmul did
nothing to suggest that Folan’s advice was wrong. Trees enveloped the great buildings,
their roots slowly ripping apart the soft limestone walls. Peter photographed a monument
with roots coiled around it, boa constrictor style, five or six feet high. So overwhelming
was the tropical forest that I thought Calakmul’s history would remain forever unknown.
Happily, I was wrong. By the early 1990s Folan’s team had learned that this
long-ignored place covered as much as twenty-five square miles and had thousands of
buildings and dozens of reservoirs and canals. It was the biggest-ever Maya polity.
Researchers cleaned and photographed its hundred-plus monuments—and just in time,
for epigraphers (scholars of ancient writing) had in the meantime deciphered Maya
hieroglyphics. In 1994 they identified the city-state’s ancient name: Kaan, the Kingdom
of the Snake. Six years later they discovered that Kaan was the focus of a devastating war
that convulsed the Maya city-state for more than a century. And Kaan is just one of the
score of Maya settlements that in the last few decades have been investigated for the first
time.
A collection of about five dozen kingdoms and city-states in a network of
alliances and feuds as convoluted as those of seventeenth-century Germany, the Maya
realm was home to one of the world’s most intellectually sophisticated cultures. About a
century before our imaginary surveillance tour, though, the Maya heartland entered a
kind of Dark Ages. Many of the greatest cities emptied, as did much of the countryside
around them. Incredibly, some of the last inscriptions are gibberish, as if scribes had lost
the knowledge of writing and were reduced to meaningless imitation of their ancestors.
By the time of our overflight, half or more of what once had been the flourishing land of
the Maya was abandoned.
Some natural scientists attribute this collapse, close in time to that of Wari and
Tiwanaku, to a massive drought. The Maya, packed by the millions into land poorly
suited to intensive farming, were dangerously close to surpassing the capacity of their
ecosystems. The drought, possibly caused by a mega-Niño, pushed the society, already so
close to the edge, over the cliff.
Such scenarios resonate with contemporary ecological fears, helping to make
them popular outside the academy. Within the academy skepticism is more common. The
archaeological record shows that southern Yucatán was abandoned, while Maya cities in
the northern part of the peninsula soldiered on or even grew. Peculiarly, the abandoned
land was the wettest—with its rivers, lakes, and rainforest, it should have been the best
place to wait out a drought. Conversely, northern Yucatán was dry and rocky. The
23

question is why people would have fled from drought to lands that would have been even
more badly affected.
And what of the rest of Mesoamerica? As the flight continues north, look west, at
the hills of what are now the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Guerrero. Here are the
quarrelsome city-states of the N˜ udzahui (Mixtec), finally overwhelming the Zapotec,
their ancient rivals based in the valley city of Monte Albán. Further north, expanding
their empire in a hot-brained hurry, are the Toltec, sweeping in every direction from the
mile-high basin that today houses Mexico City. As is often the case, the Toltec’s rapid
military success led to political strife. A Shakespearian struggle at the top, complete with
accusations of drunkenness and incest, forced out the long-ruling king, Topiltzin
Quetzalcoatl, in (probably) 987 A.D. He fled with boatloads of loyalists to the Yucatán
Peninsula, promising to return. By the time of our plane trip, Quetzalcoatl had apparently
conquered the Maya city of Chichén Itzá and was rebuilding it in his own Toltec image.
(Prominent archaeologists disagree with each other about these events, but the murals and
embossed plates at Chichén Itzá that depict a Toltec army bloodily destroying a Maya
force are hard to dismiss.)
Continue the flight to what is now the U.S. Southwest, past desert farms and cliff
dwellings, to the Mississippian societies in the Midwest. Not long ago archaeologists
with new techniques unraveled the tragedy of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, which was
once the greatest population center north of the Río Grande. Construction began in about
1000 A.D. on an earthen structure that would eventually cover fifteen acres and rise to a
height of about a hundred feet, higher than anything around it for miles. Atop the mound
was the temple for the divine kings, who arranged for the weather to favor agriculture. As
if to lend them support, fields of maize rippled out from the mound almost as far as the
eye could see. Despite this apparent evidence of their power, Cahokia’s rulers were
setting themselves up for future trouble. By mining the forests upstream for firewood and
floating the logs downriver to the city, they were removing ground cover and increasing
the likelihood of catastrophic floods. When these came, as they later did, kings who
gained their legitimacy from their claims to control the weather would face angry
questioning from their subjects.
Continue north, to the least settled land, the realm of hunters and gatherers.
Portrayed in countless U.S. history books and Hollywood westerns, the Indians of the
Great Plains are the most familiar to non-scholars. Demographically speaking, they lived
in the hinterlands, remote and thinly settled; their lives were as far from Wari or Toltec
lords as the nomads of Siberia were from the grandees of Beijing. Their material cultures
were simpler, too—no writing, no stone plazas, no massive temples—though Plains
groups did leave behind about fifty rings of rock that are reminiscent of Stonehenge. The
relative lack of material goods has led some to regard these groups as exemplifying an
ethic of living lightly on the land. Perhaps, but North America was a busy, talkative
place. By 1000 A.D., trade relationships had covered the continent for more than a
thousand years; mother-of-pearl from the Gulf of Mexico has been found in Manitoba,
and Lake Superior copper in Louisiana.
Or forgo the northern route altogether and fly the imaginary plane east from the
Beni, toward the mouth of the Amazon. Immediately after the Beni, one encounters, in
what is now the western Brazilian state of Acre, another society: a network of small
villages associated with circular and square earthworks in patterns quite unlike those
24

found in the Beni. Even less is known about these people; the remains of their villages
were discovered only in 2003, after ranchers clearing the tropical forest uncovered them.
According to the Finnish archaeologists who first described them, “it is obvious” that
“relatively high population densities” were “quite common everywhere in the Amazonian
lowlands.” The Finns here are summing up the belief of a new generation of researchers
into the Amazon: the river was much more crowded in 1000 A.D. than it is now,
especially in its lower half. Dense collections of villages thronged the bluffs that line the
shore, with their people fishing in the river and farming the floodplains and sections of
the uplands. Most important were the village orchards that marched back from the bluffs
for miles. Amazonians practiced a kind of agro-forestry, farming with trees, unlike any
kind of agriculture in Europe, Africa, or Asia.
Not all the towns were small. Near the Atlantic was the chiefdom of Marajó,
based on an enormous island at the mouth of the river. Marajó’s population, recently
estimated at 100,000, may have been equaled or even surpassed by a still-nameless
agglomeration of people six hundred miles upstream, at Santarém, a pleasant town that
today is sleeping off the effects of Amazonia’s past rubber and gold booms. The ancient
inhabitation beneath and around the modern town has barely been investigated. Almost
all that we know is that it was ideally located on a high bluff overlooking the mouth of
the Tapajós, one of the Amazon’s biggest tributaries. On this bluff geographers and
archaeologists in the 1990s found an area more than three miles long that was thickly
covered with broken ceramics, much like Ibibate. According to William I. Woods, an
archaeologist and geographer at the University of Kansas, the region could have
supported as many as 400,000 inhabitants, at least in theory, making it one of the bigger
population centers in the world.
And so on. Western scholars have written histories of the world since at least the
twelfth century. As children of their own societies, these early historians naturally
emphasized the culture they knew best, the culture their readership most wanted to hear
about. But over time they added the stories of other places in the world: chapters about
China, India, Persia, Japan, and other places. Researchers tipped their hats to
non-Western accomplishments in the sciences and arts. Sometimes the effort was
grudging or minimal, but the vacant reaches in the human tale slowly contracted.
One way to sum up the new scholarship is to say that it has begun, at last, to fill in
one of the biggest blanks in history: the Western Hemisphere before 1492. It was, in the
current view, a thriving, stunningly diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and
culture, a region where tens of millions of people loved and hated and worshipped as
people do everywhere. Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by
disease and subjugation. So thorough was the erasure that within a few generations
neither conqueror nor conquered knew that this world had existed. Now, though, it is
returning to view. It seems incumbent on us to take a look.
25

PART ONE
Numbers from Nowhere?
26

Why Billington Survived
THE FRIENDLY INDIAN
On March 22, 1621, an official Native American delegation walked through what
is now southern New England to negotiate with a group of foreigners who had taken over
a recently deserted Indian settlement. At the head of the party was an uneasy triumvirate:
Massasoit, the sachem (political-military leader) of the Wampanoag confederation, a
loose coalition of several dozen villages that controlled most of southeastern
Massachusetts; Samoset, sachem of an allied group to the north; and Tisquantum, a
distrusted captive, whom Massasoit had reluctantly brought along as an interpreter.
Massasoit was an adroit politician, but the dilemma he faced would have tested
Machiavelli. About five years before, most of his subjects had fallen before a terrible
calamity. Whole villages had been depopulated—indeed, the foreigners ahead now
occupied one of the empty sites. It was all he could do to hold together the remnants of
his people. Adding to his problems, the disaster had not touched the Wampanoag’s
longtime enemies, the Narragansett alliance to the west. Soon, Massasoit feared, they
would take advantage of the Wampanoag’s weakness and overrun them.
Desperate threats require desperate countermeasures. In a gamble, Massasoit
intended to abandon, even reverse, a long-standing policy. Europeans had been visiting
New England for at least a century. Shorter than the natives, oddly dressed, and often
unbearably dirty, the pallid foreigners had peculiar blue eyes that peeped out of the masks
of bristly, animal-like hair that encased their faces. They were irritatingly garrulous,
prone to fits of chicanery, and often surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to Indians
like basic tasks. But they also made useful and beautiful goods—copper kettles, glittering
colored glass, and steel knives and hatchets—unlike anything else in New England.
Moreover, they would exchange these valuable items for cheap furs of the sort used by
Indians as blankets. It was like happening upon a dingy kiosk that would swap fancy
electronic goods for customers’ used socks—almost anyone would be willing to overlook
the shopkeeper’s peculiarities.
Over time, the Wampanoag, like other native societies in coastal New England,
had learned how to manage the European presence. They encouraged the exchange of
goods, but would only allow their visitors to stay ashore for brief, carefully controlled
excursions. Those who overstayed their welcome were forcefully reminded of the limited
duration of Indian hospitality. At the same time, the Wampanoag fended off Indians from
the interior, preventing them from trading directly with the foreigners. In this way the
shoreline groups put themselves in the position of classic middlemen, overseeing both
European access to Indian products and Indian access to European products. Now
Massasoit was visiting a group of British with the intent of changing the rules. He would
permit the newcomers to stay for an unlimited time—provided they formally allied with
the Wampanoag against the Narragansett.
Tisquantum, the interpreter, had shown up alone at Massasoit’s home a year and a
half before. He spoke fluent English, because he had lived for several years in Britain.
27

But Massasoit didn’t trust him. He seems to have been in Massasoit’s eyes a man without
anchor, out for himself. In a conflict, Tisquantum might even side with the foreigners.
Massasoit had kept Tisquantum in a kind of captivity since his arrival, monitoring his
actions closely. And he refused to use him to negotiate with the colonists until he had
another, independent means of communication with them.
That March Samoset—the third member of the triumvirate—appeared, having
hitched a ride from his home in Maine on an English ship that was plying the coast. Not
known is whether his arrival was due to chance or if Massasoit had asked him to come
down because he had picked up a few English phrases by trading with the British. In any
case, Massasoit first had sent Samoset, rather than Tisquantum, to the foreigners.
Samoset had walked unaccompanied and unarmed into the circle of rude huts in
which the British were living on March 17, 1621. The colonists saw a robust,
erect-postured man wearing only a loincloth; his straight black hair was shaved in front
but flowed down his shoulders behind. To their further amazement, this almost naked
man greeted them in broken but understandable English. He left the next morning with a
few presents. A day later he came back, accompanied by five “tall proper men”—the
phrase is the colonist Edward Winslow’s—with three-inch black stripes painted down the
middle of their faces. The two sides talked inconclusively, each warily checking out the
other, for a few hours. Now, on the 22nd, Samoset showed up again at the foreigners’
ramshackle base, this time with Tisquantum in tow. Meanwhile Massasoit and the rest of
the Indian company waited out of sight.
Samoset and Tisquantum spoke with the colonists for about an hour. Perhaps they
then gave a signal. Or perhaps Massasoit was simply following a prearranged schedule.
In any case, he and the rest of the Indian party appeared without warning at the crest of a
hill on the south bank of the creek that ran through the foreigners’ camp. Alarmed by
Massasoit’s sudden entrance, the Europeans withdrew to the hill on the opposite bank,
where they had emplaced their few cannons behind a half-finished stockade. A standoff
ensued.
Finally Winslow exhibited the decisiveness that later led to his selection as colony
governor. Wearing a full suit of armor and carrying a sword, he waded through the
stream and offered himself as a hostage. Tisquantum, who walked with him, served as
interpreter. Massasoit’s brother took charge of Winslow and then Massasoit crossed the
water himself, followed by Tisquantum and twenty of Massasoit’s men, all ostentatiously
unarmed. The colonists took the sachem to an unfinished house and gave him some
cushions to recline on. Both sides shared some of the foreigners’ homemade moonshine,
then settled down to talk, Tisquantum translating.
To the colonists, Massasoit could be distinguished from his subjects more by
manner than by dress or ornament. He wore the same deerskin shawls and leggings and
like his fellows had covered his face with bug-repelling oil and reddish-purple dye.
Around his neck hung a pouch of tobacco, a long knife, and a thick chain of the prized
white shell beads called wampum. In appearance, Winslow wrote afterward, he was “a
very lusty man, in his best years, an able body, grave of countenance, and spare of
speech.” The Europeans, who had barely survived the previous winter, were in much
worse shape. Half of the original colony now lay underground beneath wooden markers
painted with death’s heads; most of the survivors were malnourished.
Their meeting was a critical moment in American history. The foreigners called
28

their colony Plymouth; they themselves were the famous Pilgrims. *3 As schoolchildren
learn, at that meeting the Pilgrims obtained the services of Tisquantum, usually known as
“Squanto.” In the 1970s, when I attended high school, a popular history text was
America: Its People and Values, by Leonard C. Wood, Ralph H. Gabriel, and Edward L.
Biller. Nestled among colorful illustrations of colonial life was a succinct explanation of
Tisquantum’s role:
A friendly Indian named Squanto helped the colonists. He showed them how to
plant corn and how to live on the edge of the wilderness. A soldier, Captain Miles
Standish, taught the Pilgrims how to defend themselves against unfriendly Indians.
My teacher explained that maize was unfamiliar to the Pilgrims and that
Tisquantum had demonstrated the proper maize-planting technique—sticking the seed in
little heaps of dirt, accompanied by beans and squash that would later twine themselves
up the tall stalks. And he told the Pilgrims to fertilize the soil by burying fish alongside
the maize seeds, a traditional native technique for producing a bountiful harvest.
Following this advice, my teacher said, the colonists grew so much maize that it became
the centerpiece of the first Thanksgiving. In our slipshod fashion, we students took notes.
The story in America: Its People and Values isn’t wrong, so far as it goes. But the
impression it gives is entirely misleading.
Tisquantum was critical to the colony’s survival, contemporary scholars agree. He
moved to Plymouth after the meeting and spent the rest of his life there. Just as my
teacher said, Tisquantum told the colonists to bury several small fish in each maize hill, a
procedure followed by European colonists for two centuries. Squanto’s teachings,
Winslow concluded, led to “a good increase of Indian corn”—the difference between
success and starvation.
Winslow didn’t know that fish fertilizer may not have been an age-old Indian
custom, but a recent invention—if it was an Indian practice at all. So little evidence has
emerged of Indians fertilizing with fish that some archaeologists believe that Tisquantum
actually picked up the idea from European farmers. The notion is not as ridiculous as it
may seem. Tisquantum had learned English because British sailors had kidnapped him
seven years before. To return to the Americas, he in effect had to escape twice—once
from Spain, where his captors initially sold him into slavery, and once from England, to
which he was smuggled from Spain, and where he served as a kind of living conversation
piece at a rich man’s house. In his travels, Tisquantum stayed in places where Europeans
used fish as fertilizer, a practice on the Continent since medieval times.
Skipping over the complex course of Tisquantum’s life is understandable in a
textbook with limited space. But the omission is symptomatic of the complete failure to
consider Indian motives, or even that Indians might have motives. The alliance Massasoit
negotiated with Plymouth was successful from the Wampanoag perspective, for it helped
to hold off the Narragansett. But it was a disaster from the point of view of New England
Indian society as a whole, for the alliance ensured the survival of Plymouth colony,
which spearheaded the great wave of British immigration to New England. All of this
was absent not only from my high school textbooks, but from the academic accounts they
29

were based on.
This variant of Holmberg’s Mistake dates back to the Pilgrims themselves, who
ascribed the lack of effective native resistance to the will of God. “Divine providence,”
the colonist Daniel Gookin wrote, favored “the quiet and peaceable settlement of the
English.” Later writers tended to attribute European success not to European deities but
to European technology. In a contest where only one side had rifles and cannons,
historians said, the other side’s motives were irrelevant. By the end of the nineteenth
century, the Indians of the Northeast were thought of as rapidly fading background details
in the saga of the rise of the United States—“marginal people who were losers in the
end,” as James Axtell of the College of William and Mary dryly put it in an interview.
Vietnam War–era denunciations of the Pilgrims as imperialist or racist simply replicated
the error in a new form. Whether the cause was the Pilgrim God, Pilgrim guns, or Pilgrim
greed, native losses were foreordained; Indians could not have stopped colonization, in
this view, and they hardly tried.
Beginning in the 1970s, Axtell, Neal Salisbury, Francis Jennings, and other
historians grew dissatisfied with this view. “Indians were seen as trivial, ineffectual
patsies,” Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, told me. “But that assumption—a whole
continent of patsies—simply didn’t make sense.” These researchers tried to peer through
the colonial records to the Indian lives beneath. Their work fed a tsunami of inquiry into
the interactions between natives and newcomers in the era when they faced each other as
relative equals. “No other field in American history has grown as fast,” marveled Joyce
Chaplin, a Harvard historian, in 2003.
The fall of Indian societies had everything to do with the natives themselves,
researchers argue, rather than being religiously or technologically determined. (Here the
claim is not that indigenous cultures should be blamed for their own demise but that they
helped to determine their own fates.) “When you look at the historical record, it’s clear
that Indians were trying to control their own destinies,” Salisbury said. “And often
enough they succeeded”—only to learn, as all peoples do, that the consequences were not
what they expected.
This chapter and the next will explore how two different Indian societies, the
Wampanoag and the Inka, reacted to the incursions from across the sea. It may seem odd
that a book about Indian life before contact should devote space to the period after
contact, but there are reasons for it. First, colonial descriptions of Native Americans are
among the few glimpses we have of Indians whose lives were not shaped by the presence
of Europe. The accounts of the initial encounters between Indians and Europeans are
windows into the past, even if the glass is smeared and distorted by the chroniclers’
prejudices and misapprehensions.
Second, although the stories of early contact—the Wampanoag with the British,
the Inka with the Spanish—are as dissimilar as their protagonists, many archaeologists,
anthropologists, and historians have recently come to believe that they have deep
commonalities. And the tales of other Indians’ encounters with the strangers were alike in
the same way. From these shared features, researchers have constructed what might be
thought of as a master narrative of the meeting of Europe and America. Although it
remains surprisingly little known outside specialist circles, this master narrative
illuminates the origins of every nation in the Americas today. More than that, the effort to
understand events after Columbus shed unexpected light on critical aspects of life before
30

Columbus. Indeed, the master narrative led to such surprising conclusions about Native
American societies before the arrival of Europeans that it stirred up an intellectual
firestorm.
COMING OF AGE IN THE DAWNLAND
Consider Tisquantum, the “friendly Indian” of the textbook. More than likely
Tisquantum was not the name he was given at birth. In that part of the Northeast,
tisquantum referred to rage, especially the rage of manitou, the world-suffusing spiritual
power at the heart of coastal Indians’ religious beliefs. When Tisquantum approached the
Pilgrims and identified himself by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his hand
and said, Hello, I’m the Wrath of God. No one would lightly adopt such a name in
contemporary Western society. Neither would anyone in seventeenth-century indigenous
society. Tisquantum was trying to project something.
Tisquantum was not an Indian. True, he belonged to that category of people
whose ancestors had inhabited the Western Hemisphere for thousands of years. And it is
true that I refer to him as an Indian, because the label is useful shorthand; so would his
descendants, and for much the same reason. But “Indian” was not a category that
Tisquantum himself would have recognized, any more than the inhabitants of the same
area today would call themselves “Western Hemisphereans.” Still less would Tisquantum
have claimed to belong to “Norumbega,” the label by which most Europeans then
referred to New England. (“New England” was coined only in 1616.) As Tisquantum’s
later history made clear, he regarded himself first and foremost as a citizen of Patuxet, a
shoreline settlement halfway between what is now Boston and the beginning of Cape
Cod.
Patuxet was one of the dozen or so settlements in what is now eastern
Massachusetts and Rhode Island that comprised the Wampanoag confederation. In turn,
the Wampanoag were part of a tripartite alliance with two other confederations: the
Nauset, which comprised some thirty groups on Cape Cod; and the Massachusett, several
dozen villages clustered around Massachusetts Bay. All of these people spoke variants of
Massachusett, a member of the Algonquian language family, the biggest in eastern North
America at the time. (Massachusett thus was the name both of a language and of one of
the groups that spoke it.) In Massachusett, the name for the New England shore was the
Dawnland, the place where the sun rose. The inhabitants of the Dawnland were the
People of the First Light.
31

MASSACHUSETT ALLIANCE, 1600 A.D.
Ten thousand years ago, when Indians in Mesoamerica and Peru were inventing
agriculture and coalescing into villages, New England was barely inhabited, for the
excellent reason that it had been covered until relatively recently by an ice sheet a mile
thick. People slowly moved in, though the area long remained cold and uninviting,
especially along the coastline. Because rising sea levels continually flooded the shore,
marshy Cape Cod did not fully lock into its contemporary configuration until about 1000
B.C. By that time the Dawnland had evolved into something more attractive: an
ecological crazy quilt of wet maple forests, shellfish-studded tidal estuaries, thick
highland woods, mossy bogs full of cranberries and orchids, fractally complex snarls of
sandbars and beachfront, and fire-swept stands of pitch pine—“tremendous variety even
within the compass of a few miles,” as the ecological historian William Cronon put it.
In the absence of written records, researchers have developed techniques for
teasing out evidence of the past. Among them is “glottochronology,” the attempt to
estimate how long ago two languages separated from a common ancestor by evaluating
their degree of divergence on a list of key words. In the 1970s and 1980s linguists applied
glottochronological techniques to the Algonquian dictionaries compiled by early
colonists. However tentatively, the results indicated that the various Algonquian
32

languages in New England all date back to a common ancestor that appeared in the
Northeast a few centuries before Christ.
The ancestral language may derive from what is known as the Hopewell culture.
Around two thousand years ago, Hopewell jumped into prominence from its bases in the
Midwest, establishing a trade network that covered most of North America. The
Hopewell culture introduced monumental earthworks and, possibly, agriculture to the rest
of the cold North. Hopewell villages, unlike their more egalitarian neighbors, were
stratified, with powerful, priestly rulers commanding a mass of commoners.
Archaeologists have found no evidence of large-scale warfare at this time, and thus
suggest that Hopewell probably did not achieve its dominance by conquest. Instead, one
can speculate, the vehicle for transformation may have been Hopewell religion, with its
intoxicatingly elaborate funeral rites. If so, the adoption of Algonquian in the Northeast
would mark an era of spiritual ferment and heady conversion, much like the time when
Islam rose and spread Arabic throughout the Middle East.
Hopewell itself declined around 400 A.D. But its trade network remained intact.
Shell beads from Florida, obsidian from the Rocky Mountains, and mica from Tennessee
found their way to the Northeast. Borrowing technology and ideas from the Midwest, the
nomadic peoples of New England transformed their societies. By the end of the first
millennium A.D., agriculture was spreading rapidly and the region was becoming an
unusual patchwork of communities, each with its preferred terrain, way of subsistence,
and cultural style.
Scattered about the many lakes, ponds, and swamps of the cold uplands were
small, mobile groups of hunters and gatherers—“collectors,” as researchers sometimes
call them. Most had recently adopted agriculture or were soon to do so, but it was still a
secondary source of food, a supplement to the wild products of the land. New England’s
major river valleys, by contrast, held large, permanent villages, many nestled in
constellations of suburban hamlets and hunting camps. Because extensive fields of maize,
beans, and squash surrounded every home, these settlements sprawled along the
Connecticut, Charles, and other river valleys for miles, one town bumping up against the
other. Along the coast, where Tisquantum and Massasoit lived, villages often were
smaller and looser, though no less permanent.
Unlike the upland hunters, the Indians on the rivers and coastline did not roam the
land; instead, most seem to have moved between a summer place and a winter place, like
affluent snowbirds alternating between Manhattan and Miami. The distances were
smaller, of course; shoreline families would move a fifteen-minute walk inland, to avoid
direct exposure to winter storms and tides. Each village had its own distinct mix of
farming and foraging—this one here, adjacent to a rich oyster bed, might plant maize
purely for variety, whereas that one there, just a few miles away, might subsist almost
entirely on its harvest, filling great underground storage pits each fall. Although these
settlements were permanent, winter and summer alike, they often were not tightly knit
entities, with houses and fields in carefully demarcated clusters. Instead people spread
themselves through estuaries, sometimes grouping into neighborhoods, sometimes with
each family on its own, its maize ground proudly separate. Each community was
constantly “joining and splitting like quicksilver in a fluid pattern within its bounds,”
wrote Kathleen J. Bragdon, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary—a
type of settlement, she remarked, with “no name in the archaeological or anthropological
33

literature.”
In the Wampanoag confederation, one of these quicksilver communities was
Patuxet, where Tisquantum was born at the end of the sixteenth century.
Tucked into the great sweep of Cape Cod Bay, Patuxet sat on a low rise above a
small harbor, jigsawed by sandbars and shallow enough that children could walk from the
beach hundreds of yards into the water before the waves went above their heads. To the
west, maize hills marched across the sandy hillocks in parallel rows. Beyond the fields, a
mile or more away from the sea, rose a forest of oak, chestnut, and hickory, open and
park-like, the underbrush kept down by expert annual burning. “Pleasant of air and
prospect,” as one English visitor described the area, Patuxet had “much plenty both of
fish and fowl every day in the year.” Runs of spawning Atlantic salmon, short-nose
sturgeon, striped bass, and American shad annually filled the harbor. But the most
important fish harvest came in late spring, when the herring-like alewives swarmed the
fast, shallow stream that cut through the village. So numerous were the fish, and so
driven, that when mischievous boys walled off the stream with stones the alewives would
leap the barrier—silver bodies gleaming in the sun—and proceed upstream.
Tisquantum’s childhood wetu (home) was formed from arched poles lashed
together into a dome that was covered in winter by tightly woven rush mats and in
summer by thin sheets of chestnut bark. A fire burned constantly in the center, the smoke
venting through a hole in the center of the roof. English visitors did not find this
arrangement peculiar; chimneys were just coming into use in Britain, and most homes
there, including those of the wealthy, were still heated by fires beneath central roof holes.
Nor did the English regard the Dawnland wetu as primitive; its multiple layers of mats,
which trapped insulating layers of air, were “warmer than our English houses,” sighed the
colonist William Wood. The wetu was less leaky than the typical English
wattle-and-daub house, too. Wood did not conceal his admiration for the way Indian mats
“deny entrance to any drop of rain, though it come both fierce and long.”
Around the edge of the house were low beds, sometimes wide enough for a whole
family to sprawl on them together; usually raised about a foot from the floor,
platform-style; and always piled with mats and furs. Going to sleep in the firelight, young
Tisquantum would have stared up at the diddering shadows of the hemp bags and bark
boxes hanging from the rafters. Voices would skirl up in the darkness: one person singing
a lullaby, then another person, until everyone was asleep. In the morning, when he woke,
big, egg-shaped pots of corn-and-bean mash would be on the fire, simmering with meat,
vegetables, or dried fish to make a slow-cooked dinner stew. Outside the wetu he would
hear the cheerful thuds of the large mortars and pestles in which women crushed dried
maize into nokake, a flour-like powder “so sweet, toothsome, and hearty,” colonist
Gookin wrote, “that an Indian will travel many days with no other but this meal.”
Although Europeans bemoaned the lack of salt in Indian cuisine, they thought it
nourishing. According to one modern reconstruction, Dawnland diets at the time
averaged about 2,500 calories a day, better than those usual in famine-racked Europe.
34

In the wetu, wide strips of bark are clamped between arched inner and outer poles.
Because the poles are flexible, bark layers can be sandwiched in or removed at will,
depending on whether the householder wants to increase insulation during the winter or
let in more air during the summer. In its elegant simplicity, the wetu’s design would have
pleased the most demanding modernist architect.
Pilgrim writers universally reported that Wampanoag families were close and
loving—more so than English families, some thought. Europeans in those days tended to
view children as moving straight from infancy to adulthood around the age of seven, and
often thereupon sent them out to work. Indian parents, by contrast, regarded the years
before puberty as a time of playful development, and kept their offspring close by until
marriage. (Jarringly, to the contemporary eye, some Pilgrims interpreted this as sparing
the rod.) Boys like Tisquantum explored the countryside, swam in the ponds at the south
end of the harbor, and played a kind of soccer with a small leather ball; in the summer
and fall they camped out in huts in the fields, weeding the maize and chasing away birds.
Archery practice began at age two. By adolescence boys would make a game of shooting
at each other and dodging the arrows.
The primary goal of Dawnland education was molding character. Men and
women were expected to be brave, hardy, honest, and uncomplaining. Chatterboxes and
gossips were frowned upon. “He that speaks seldom and opportunely, being as good as
his word, is the only man they love,” Wood explained. Character formation began early,
with family games of tossing naked children into the snow. (They were pulled out
quickly and placed next to the fire, in a practice reminiscent of Scandinavian saunas.)
When Indian boys came of age, they spent an entire winter alone in the forest, equipped
only with a bow, a hatchet, and a knife. These methods worked, the awed Wood reported.
“Beat them, whip them, pinch them, punch them, if [the Indians] resolve not to flinch for
it, they will not.”
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Tisquantum’s regimen was probably tougher than that of his friends, according to
Salisbury, the Smith College historian, for it seems that he was selected to become a
pniese, a kind of counselor-bodyguard to the sachem. To master the art of ignoring pain,
future pniese had to subject themselves to such miserable experiences as running
barelegged through brambles. And they fasted often, to learn self-discipline. After
spending their winter in the woods, pniese candidates came back to an additional test:
drinking bitter gentian juice until they vomited, repeating this bulimic process over and
over until, near fainting, they threw up blood.
Patuxet, like its neighboring settlements, was governed by a sachem, who upheld
the law, negotiated treaties, controlled foreign contacts, collected tribute, declared war,
provided for widows and orphans, and allocated farmland when there were disputes over
it. (Dawnlanders lived in a loose scatter, but they knew which family could use which
land—“very exact and punctuall,” Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island colony,
called Indian care for property lines.) Most of the time, the Patuxet sachem owed fealty to
the great sachem in the Wampanoag village to the southwest, and through him to the
sachems of the allied confederations of the Nauset in Cape Cod and the Massachusett
around Boston. Meanwhile, the Wampanoag were rivals and enemies of the Narragansett
and Pequots to the west and the many groups of Abenaki to the north. As a practical
matter, sachems had to gain the consent of their people, who could easily move away and
join another sachemship. Analogously, the great sachems had to please or bully the
lesser, lest by the defection of small communities they lose stature.
Sixteenth-century New England housed 100,000 people or more, a figure that was
slowly increasing. Most of those people lived in shoreline communities, where rising
numbers were beginning to change agriculture from an option to a necessity. These
bigger settlements required more centralized administration; natural resources like good
land and spawning streams, though not scarce, now needed to be managed. In
consequence, boundaries between groups were becoming more formal. Sachems, given
more power and more to defend, pushed against each other harder. Political tensions were
constant. Coastal and riverine New England, according to the archaeologist and
ethnohistorian Peter Thomas, was “an ever-changing collage of personalities, alliances,
plots, raids and encounters which involved every Indian [settlement].”
Armed conflict was frequent but brief and mild by European standards. The casus
belli was usually the desire to avenge an insult or gain status, not the wish for conquest.
Most battles consisted of lightning guerrilla raids by ad hoc companies in the forest: flash
of black-and-yellow-striped bows behind trees, hiss and whip of stone-tipped arrows
through the air, eruption of angry cries. Attackers slipped away as soon as retribution had
been exacted. Losers quickly conceded their loss of status. Doing otherwise would have
been like failing to resign after losing a major piece in a chess tournament—a social
irritant, a waste of time and resources. Women and children were rarely killed, though
they were sometimes abducted and forced to join the winning group. Captured men were
often tortured (they were admired, though not necessarily spared, if they endured the pain
stoically). Now and then, as a sign of victory, slain foes were scalped, much as British
skirmishes with the Irish sometimes finished with a parade of Irish heads on pikes. In
especially large clashes, adversaries might meet in the open, as in European battlefields,
though the results, Roger Williams noted, were “farre less bloudy, and devouring then the
cruell Warres of Europe.” Nevertheless, by Tisquantum’s time defensive palisades were
36

increasingly common, especially in the river valleys.
Inside the settlement was a world of warmth, family, and familiar custom. But the
world outside, as Thomas put it, was “a maze of confusing actions and individuals
fighting to maintain an existence in the shadow of change.”
And that was before the Europeans showed up.
TOURISM AND TREACHERY
British fishing vessels may have reached Newfoundland as early as the 1480s and
areas to the south soon after. In 1501, just nine years after Columbus’s first voyage, the
Portuguese adventurer Gaspar Corte-Real abducted fifty-odd Indians from Maine.
Examining the captives, Corte-Real found to his astonishment that two were wearing
items from Venice: a broken sword and two silver rings. As James Axtell has noted,
Corte-Real probably was able to kidnap such a large number of people only because the
Indians were already so comfortable dealing with Europeans that big groups willingly
*4
came aboard his ship.
The earliest written description of the People of the First Light was by Giovanni
da Verrazzano, an Italian mariner-for-hire commissioned by the king of France in 1523 to
discover whether one could reach Asia by rounding the Americas to the north. Sailing
north from the Carolinas, he observed that the coastline everywhere was “densely
populated,” smoky with Indian bonfires; he could sometimes smell the burning hundreds
of miles away. The ship anchored in wide Narragansett Bay, near what is now
Providence, Rhode Island. Verrazzano was one of the first Europeans the natives had
seen, perhaps even the first, but the Narragansett were not intimidated. Almost instantly,
twenty long canoes surrounded the visitors. Cocksure and graceful, the Narragansett
sachem leapt aboard: a tall, longhaired man of about forty with multicolored jewelry
dangling about his neck and ears, “as beautiful of stature and build as I can possibly
describe,” Verrazzano wrote.
His reaction was common. Time and time again Europeans described the People
of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens. Eating an incredibly nutritious diet,
working hard but not broken by toil, the people of New England were taller and more
robust than those who wanted to move in—“as proper men and women for feature and
limbes as can be founde,” in the words of the rebellious Pilgrim Thomas Morton.
Because famine and epidemic disease had been rare in the Dawnland, its inhabitants had
none of the pox scars or rickety limbs common on the other side of the Atlantic. Native
New Englanders, in William Wood’s view, were “more amiable to behold (though
[dressed] only in Adam’s finery) than many a compounded fantastic [English dandy] in
the newest fashion.”
The Pilgrims were less sanguine about Indians’ multicolored, multitextured mode
of self-presentation. To be sure, the newcomers accepted the practicality of deerskin
robes as opposed to, say, fitted British suits. And the colonists understood why natives’
skin and hair shone with bear or eagle fat (it warded off sun, wind, and insects). And they
could overlook the Indians’ practice of letting prepubescent children run about without a
stitch on. But the Pilgrims, who regarded personal adornment as a species of idolatry,
were dismayed by what they saw as the indigenous penchant for foppery. The robes were
adorned with animal-head mantles, snakeskin belts, and bird-wing headdresses. Worse,
37

many Dawnlanders tattooed their faces, arms, and legs with elaborate geometric patterns
and totemic animal symbols. They wore jewelry made of shell and swans’-down earrings
and chignons spiked with eagle feathers. If that weren’t enough, both sexes painted their
faces red, white, and black—ending up, Gookin sniffed, with “one part of their face of
one color; and another, of another, very deformedly.”
In 1585–86 the artist John White spent fifteen months in what is now North
Carolina, returning with more than seventy watercolors of American people, plants, and
animals. White’s work, later distributed in a series of romanticized engravings (two of
which are shown here), was not of documentary quality by today’s standards—his
Indians are posed like Greek statues. But at the same time his intent was clear. To his eye,
38

the people of the Carolinas, cultural cousins to the Wampanoag, were in superb health,
especially compared to poorly nourished, smallpox-scarred Europeans. And they lived in
what White viewed as well-ordered settlements, with big, flourishing fields of maize.
And the hair! As a rule, young men wore it long on one side, in an equine mane,
but cropped the other side short, which prevented it from getting tangled in their bow
strings. But sometimes they cut their hair into such wild patterns that attempting to
imitate them, Wood sniffed, “would torture the wits of a curious barber.” Tonsures,
pigtails, head completely shaved but for a single forelock, long sides drawn into a queue
with a raffish short-cut roach in the middle—all of it was prideful and abhorrent to the
Pilgrims. (Not everyone in England saw it that way. Inspired by asymmetrical Indian
coiffures, seventeenth-century London blades wore long, loose hanks of hair known as
“lovelocks.”)
As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they tended to view Europeans with
disdain as soon as they got to know them. The Wendat (Huron) in Ontario, a chagrined
missionary reported, thought the French possessed “little intelligence in comparison to
themselves.” Europeans, Indians told other Indians, were physically weak, sexually
untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain smelly. (The British and French, many of
whom had not taken a bath in their entire lives, were amazed by the Indian interest in
personal cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the “savages” were disgusted by
handkerchiefs: “They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put
it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground.”
The Mi’kmaq in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia scoffed at the notion of European
superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants all trying
to settle somewhere else?
For fifteen days Verrazzano and his crew were the Narragansett’s honored
guests—though the Indians, Verrazzano admitted, kept their women out of sight after
hearing the sailors’ “irksome clamor” when females came into view. Much of the time
was spent in friendly barter. To the Europeans’ confusion, their steel and cloth did not
interest the Narragansett, who wanted to swap only for “little bells, blue crystals, and
other trinkets to put in the ear or around the neck.” On Verrazzano’s next stop, the Maine
coast, the Abenaki did want steel and cloth—demanded them, in fact. But up north the
friendly welcome had vanished. The Indians denied the visitors permission to land;
refusing even to touch the Europeans, they passed goods back and forth on a rope over
the water. As soon as the crew members sent over the last items, the locals began
“showing their buttocks and laughing.” Mooned by the Indians! Verrazzano was baffled
by this “barbarous” behavior, but the reason for it seems clear: unlike the Narragansett,
the Abenaki had long experience with Europeans.
39

PEOPLES OF THE DAWNLAND, 1600 A.D.
During the century after Verrazzano Europeans were regular visitors to the
Dawnland, usually fishing, sometimes trading, occasionally kidnapping natives as
souvenirs. (Verrazzano had grabbed one himself, a boy of about eight.) By 1610 Britain
alone had about two hundred vessels operating off Newfoundland and New England;
hundreds more came from France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. With striking uniformity,
these travelers reported that New England was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605
and 1606 Samuel de Champlain, the famous explorer, visited Cape Cod, hoping to
establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A
year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges—British, despite the name—tried to found a community
in Maine. It began with more people than the Pilgrims’ later venture in Plymouth and was
better organized and supplied. Nonetheless, the local Indians, numerous and well armed,
40

killed eleven colonists and drove the rest back home within months.
Many ships anchored off Patuxet. Martin Pring, a British trader, camped there
with a crew of forty-four for seven weeks in the summer of 1603, gathering
sassafras—the species was common in the cleared, burned-over areas at the edge of
Indian settlements. To ingratiate themselves with their hosts, Pring’s crew regularly
played the guitar for them (the Indians had drums, flutes, and rattles, but no string
instruments). Despite the entertainment, the Patuxet eventually got tired of the foreigners
camping out on their land. Giving their guests a subtle hint that they should be moving
on, 140 armed locals surrounded their encampment. Next day the Patuxet burned down
the woodlands where Pring and his men were working. The foreigners left within hours.
Some two hundred Indians watched them from the shore, politely inviting them to come
back for another short visit. Later Champlain, too, stopped at Patuxet, but left before
wearing out his welcome.
Tisquantum probably saw Pring, Champlain, and other European visitors, but the
first time Europeans are known to have affected his life was in the summer of 1614. A
small ship hove to, sails a-flap. Out to meet the crew came the Patuxet. Almost certainly
the sachem would have been of the party; he would have been accompanied by his
pniese, including Tisquantum. The strangers’ leader was a sight beyond belief: a stocky
man, even shorter than most foreigners, with a voluminous red beard that covered so
much of his face that he looked to Indian eyes more beast than human. This was Captain
John Smith of Pocahontas fame. According to Smith, he had lived an adventurous and
glamorous life. As a youth, he claimed, he had served as a privateer, after which he was
captured and enslaved by the Turks. He escaped and awarded himself the rank of captain
in the army of Smith.
*5 Later he actually became captain of a ship and traveled to North
America several times. On this occasion he had sailed to Maine with two ships, intending
to hunt whales. The party spent two months chasing the beasts but failed to catch a single
one. Plan B, Smith wrote later, was “Fish and Furs.” He assigned most of the crew to
catch and dry fish in one ship while he puttered up and down the coast with the other,
bartering for furs. In the middle of this perambulating he showed up in Patuxet.
Despite Smith’s peculiar appearance, Tisquantum and his fellows treated him
well. They apparently gave him a tour, during which he admired the gardens, orchards,
and maize fields, and the “great troupes of well-proportioned people” tending them. At
some point a quarrel occurred and bows were drawn, Smith said, “fortie or fiftie” Patuxet
surrounding him. His account is vague, but one imagines that the Indians were hinting at
a limit to his stay. In any case, the visit ended cordially enough, and Smith returned to
Maine and then England. He had a map drawn of what he had seen, persuaded Prince
Charles to look at it, and curried favor with him by asking him to award British names to
all the Indian settlements. Then he put the maps in the books he wrote to extol his
adventures. In this way Patuxet acquired its English name, Plymouth, after the city in
England (it was then spelled “Plimoth”).
Smith left his lieutenant, Thomas Hunt, behind in Maine to finish loading the
other ship with dried fish. Without consulting Smith, Hunt decided to visit Patuxet.
Taking advantage of the Indians’ recent good experience with English visitors, he invited
people to come aboard. The thought of a summer day on the foreigners’ vessel must have
been tempting. Several dozen villagers, Tisquantum among them, canoed to the ship.
Without warning or pretext the sailors tried to shove them into the hold. The Indians
41

fought back. Hunt’s men swept the deck with small-arms fire, creating “a great
slaughter.” At gunpoint, Hunt forced the survivors belowdecks. With Tisquantum and at
least nineteen others, he sailed to Europe, stopping only once, at Cape Cod, where he
kidnapped seven Nauset.
In Hunt’s wake the Patuxet community raged, as did the rest of the Wampanoag
confederacy and the Nauset. The sachems vowed not to let foreigners rest on their shores
again. Because of the “worthlesse” Hunt, lamented Gorges, the would-be colonizer of
Maine, “a warre [was] now new begunne between the inhabitants of those parts, and us.”
Despite European guns, the Indians’ greater numbers, entrenched positions, knowledge of
the terrain, and superb archery made them formidable adversaries. About two years after
Hunt’s offenses, a French ship wrecked at the tip of Cape Cod. Its crew built a rude
shelter with a defensive wall made from poles. The Nauset, hidden outside, picked off the
sailors one by one until only five were left. They captured the five and sent them to
groups victimized by European kidnappers. Another French vessel anchored in Boston
Harbor at about the same time. The Massachusett killed everyone aboard and set the ship
afire.
Tisquantum was away five years. When he returned, everything had
changed—calamitously. Patuxet had vanished. The Pilgrims had literally built their
village on top of it.
THE PLACE OF THE SKULL
According to family lore, my great-grandmother’s great-grandmother’s
great-grandfather was the first white person hanged in North America. His name was
John Billington. He emigrated aboard the Mayflower, which anchored off the coast of
Massachusetts on November 9, 1620. Billington was not among the company of saints, to
put it mildly; within six months of arrival he became the first white person in America to
be tried for sassing the police. His two sons were no better. Even before landing, one
nearly blew up the Mayflower by shooting a gun at a keg of gunpowder while inside the
ship. After the Pilgrims landed the other son ran off to live with some nearby Indians,
leading to great consternation and an expedition to fetch him back. Meanwhile Billington
père made merry with other non-Puritan lowlifes and haphazardly plotted against
authority. The family was “one of the profanest” in Plymouth colony, complained
William Bradford, its long-serving governor. Billington, in his opinion, was “a knave,
and so shall live and die.” What one historian called Billington’s “troublesome career”
ended in 1630 when he was hanged for shooting somebody in a quarrel. My family has
always claimed that he was framed—but we would say that, wouldn’t we?
Growing up, I was always tickled by this raffish personal connection to history:
part of the Puritans, but not actually puritanical. As an adult, I decided to learn more
about Billington. A few hours at the library sufficed to convince me that some aspects of
our agreeable family legend were untrue. Although Billington was in fact hanged, at least
two other Europeans were executed in North America before him. And one of them was
convicted for the much more interesting offense of killing his pregnant wife and eating
her. My ancestor was probably only No. 3, and there is a whisper of scholarly doubt
about whether he deserves to be even that high on the list.
I had learned about Plymouth in school. But it was not until I was poking through
42

the scattered references to Billington that it occurred to me that my ancestor, like
everyone else in the colony, had voluntarily enlisted in a venture that had him arriving in
New England without food or shelter six weeks before winter. Not only that, he joined a
group that, so far as is known, set off with little idea of where it was heading. In Europe,
the Pilgrims had refused to hire the experienced John Smith as a guide, on the theory that
they could use the maps in his book. In consequence, as Smith later crowed, the hapless
Mayflower spent several frigid weeks scouting around Cape Cod for a good place to land,
during which time many colonists became sick and died. Landfall at Patuxet did not end
their problems. The colonists had intended to produce their own food, but inexplicably
neglected to bring any cows, sheep, mules, or horses. To be sure, the Pilgrims had
intended to make most of their livelihood not by farming but by catching fish for export
to Britain. But the only fishing gear the Pilgrims brought was useless in New England.
Half of the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through the first winter, which to me
seemed amazing. How did they survive?
In his history of Plymouth colony, Governor Bradford himself provides one
answer: robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower hove to first at Cape Cod. An
armed company of Pilgrims staggered out. Eventually they found a deserted Indian
habitation. The newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug open burial sites and ransacked
homes, looking for underground stashes of food. After two days of nervous work the
company hauled ten bushels of maize back to the Mayflower, carrying much of the booty
in a big metal kettle the men had also stolen. “And sure it was God’s good providence
that we found this corn,” Winslow wrote, “for else we know not how we should have
done.”
The Pilgrims were typical in their lack of preparation. Expeditions from France
and Spain were usually backed by the state, and generally staffed by soldiers accustomed
to hard living. English voyages, by contrast, were almost always funded by venture
capitalists who hoped for a quick cash-out. Like Silicon Valley in the heyday of the
Internet bubble, London was the center of a speculative mania about the Americas. As
with the dot-com boom, a great deal of profoundly fractured cerebration occurred.
Decades after first touching the Americas, London’s venture capitalists still hadn’t
figured out that New England is colder than Britain despite being farther south. Even
when they focused on a warmer place like Virginia, they persistently selected as colonists
people ignorant of farming; multiplying the difficulties, the would-be colonizers were
arriving in the middle of a severe, multiyear drought. As a result, Jamestown and the
other Virginia forays survived on Indian charity—they were “utterly dependent and
therefore controllable,” in the phrase of Karen Ordahl Kuppermann, a New York
University historian. The same held true for my ancestor’s crew in Plymouth.
Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were also not woods-people; indeed,
they were so incurious about their environment that Bradford felt obliged to comment in
his journal when Francis Billington, my ancestor’s son, climbed to the top of a tall tree to
look around. As Thoreau noted with disgust, the colonists landed at Plymouth on
December 16, but it was not until January 8 that one of them went as far away as two
miles—and even then the traveler was, again, Francis Billington. “A party of emigrants to
California or Oregon,” Thoreau complained,
43

with no less work on their hands,—and more hostile Indians,—would do as much
exploring in the first afternoon, and the Sieur de Champlain would have sought an
interview with the savages, and examined the country as far as the Connecticut [River,
eighty miles away], and made a map of it, before Billington had climbed his tree.
Huddled in their half-built village that first terrible winter, the colonists rarely saw
the area’s inhabitants, except for the occasional shower of brass- or claw-tipped arrows.
After February, glimpses and sightings became more frequent. Scared, the Pilgrims
hauled five small cannons from the Mayflower and emplaced them in a defensive
fortification. But after all the anxiety, their first contact with Indians went surprisingly
easily. Within days Tisquantum came to settle among them. And then they heard his
stories.
No record survives of Tisquantum’s first journey across the Atlantic, but
arithmetic gives some hint of the conditions in Hunt’s ship. John Smith had arrived with
two ships and a crew of forty-five. If the two ships had been of equal size, Hunt would
have sailed with a crew of about twenty-two. Because Hunt, Smith’s subordinate, had the
smaller of the two vessels, the actual number was surely less. Adding twenty or more
captured Indians thus meant that the ship was sailing with at least twice its normal
complement. Tisquantum would have been tied or chained, to prevent rebellion, and
jammed into whatever dark corner of the hull was available. Presumably he was fed from
the ship’s cargo of dried fish. Smith took six weeks to cross the Atlantic to England.
There is no reason to think Hunt went faster. The only difference was that he took his
ship to Málaga, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast. There he intended to sell all of his cargo,
including the human beings.
The Indians’ appearance in this European city surely caused a stir. Not long
before, Shakespeare had griped in The Tempest that the populace of the much bigger city
of London “would not give a doit [a small coin] to a lame beggar, [but] will lay out ten to
see a dead Indian.” Hunt managed to sell only a few of his captives before local Roman
Catholic priests seized the rest—the Spanish Church vehemently opposed brutality
toward Indians. (In 1537 Pope Paul III proclaimed that “Indians themselves indeed are
true men” and should not be “deprived of their liberty” and “reduced to our service like
brute animals.”) The priests intended to save both Tisquantum’s body, by preventing his
enslavement, and his soul, by converting him to Christianity. It is unlikely that
Tisquantum was converted, though it’s possible that he allowed the friars to think he had
been. In any case, this resourceful man convinced them to let him return home—or,
rather, to try to return. He got to London, where he stayed with John Slany, a shipbuilder
with investments in Newfoundland. Slany apparently taught Tisquantum English while
maintaining him as a curiosity in his townhouse. Meanwhile, Tisquantum persuaded him
to arrange for passage to North America on a fishing vessel. He ended up in a tiny British
fishing camp on the southern edge of Newfoundland. It was on the same continent as
Patuxet, but between them were a thousand miles of rocky coastline and the Mi’Kmac
and Abenaki alliances, which were at war with one another.
Because traversing this unfriendly territory would be difficult, Tisquantum began
looking for a ride to Patuxet. He extolled the bounty of New England to Thomas Dermer,
one of Smith’s subordinates, who was then staying in the same camp. Dermer, excited by
44

Tisquantum’s promise of easy wealth, contacted Ferdinando Gorges. Gorges, a longtime,
slightly dotty enthusiast about the Americas, promised to send over a ship with the men,
supplies, and legal papers necessary for Dermer to take a crack at establishing a colony in
New England. Dermer, with Tisquantum, was supposed to meet the ship when it arrived
in New England.
One Edward Rowcraft captained the ship sent by Gorges from England.
According to Gorges’s principal biographer, Rowcraft “appears to have been unfit for
such an enterprise.” This was an understatement. In a bizarre episode, Rowcraft sailed to
the Maine coast in early 1619; promptly spotted a French fishing boat; seized it for
supposedly trespassing on British property (North America); placed its crew in chains
aboard his own ship; sent that ship back to Gorges with the prisoners; continued his
journey on the smaller French vessel, which led to a mutiny; quelled the mutiny; stranded
the mutineers on the Maine coast; discovered that a) without the mutineers he didn’t have
enough people to operate the captured ship and b) it was slowly filling up with water
from leaks; and decided to sail immediately for Britain’s colony in Jamestown, Virginia,
which had the facilities to repair the hull—a course that entailed skipping the promised
rendezvous with Dermer. At Jamestown, Rowcraft managed, through inattentiveness, to
sink his ship. Not long afterward he was killed in a brawl.
Incredibly, Dermer failed to execute his part of the plan, too. In orthodox
comedy-of-errors style, he did not wait for Rowcraft in Maine, as he was supposed to, but
sailed back to England, Tisquantum in tow. (The two ships more or less crossed paths in
the Atlantic.) Dermer and Tisquantum met personally with Gorges.
*6 Evidently they
made an excellent impression, for despite Dermer’s proven inability to follow
instructions Gorges sent him back with Tisquantum and a fresh ship to meet Rowcraft,
who was supposed to be waiting for them in New England. Dermer touched land in
Maine and discovered that Rowcraft had already left. On May 19, 1619, still
accompanied by Tisquantum, he set out for Massachusetts, hoping to catch up with
Rowcraft (he didn’t know that Rowcraft had sunk his own ship).
What Tisquantum saw on his return home was unimaginable. From southern
Maine to Narragansett Bay, the coast was empty—“utterly void,” Dermer reported. What
had once been a line of busy communities was now a mass of tumbledown homes and
untended fields overrun by blackberries. Scattered among the houses and fields were
skeletons bleached by the sun. Slowly Dermer’s crew realized they were sailing along the
border of a cemetery two hundred miles long and forty miles deep. Patuxet had been hit
with special force. Not a single person remained. Tisquantum’s entire social world had
vanished.
Looking for his kinsfolk, he led Dermer on a melancholy march inland. The
settlements they passed lay empty to the sky but full of untended dead. Tisquantum’s
party finally encountered some survivors, a handful of families in a shattered village.
These people sent for Massasoit, who appeared, Dermer wrote, “with a guard of fiftie
armed men”—and a captive French sailor, a survivor of the shipwreck on Cape Cod.
Massasoit asked Dermer to send back the Frenchman. And then he told Tisquantum what
had happened.
One of the French sailors had learned enough Massachusett to inform his captors
before dying that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Nauset scoffed at the
threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. Based
45

on accounts of the symptoms, the epidemic was probably of viral hepatitis, according to a
study by Arthur E. Spiess, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D.
Spiess, of the Medical College of Virginia. (In their view, the strain was, like hepatitis A,
probably spread by contaminated food, rather than by sexual contact, like hepatitis B or
C.) Whatever the cause, the results were ruinous. The Indians “died in heapes as they lay
in their houses,” the merchant Thomas Morton observed. In their panic, the healthy fled
from the sick, carrying the disease with them to neighboring communities. Behind them
remained the dying, “left for crows, kites, and vermin to prey upon.” Beginning in 1616,
the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed as much as 90 percent
of the people in coastal New England. “And the bones and skulls upon the severall places
of their habitations made such a spectacle,” Morton wrote, that the Massachusetts
woodlands seemed to be “a new-found Golgotha,” the Place of the Skull, where
executions took place in Roman Jerusalem.
The religious overtones in Morton’s metaphor are well placed. Neither the Indians
nor the Pilgrims had our contemporary understanding of infectious disease. Each believed
that sickness reflected the will of celestial forces. As the writer and historian Paula Gunn
Allen put it,
The idea that the realm of the spirits or the supernatural was powerfully engaged
in the day-to-day life of nations as well as of villagers was commonly held on both sides
of the Atlantic…. Both [Indians and Europeans] predicted events by the position of
certain stars on the ecliptic plane around earth as much as by visionary techniques, and
both assumed the reality of malicious as well as beneficent supernaturals.
The only real question in the minds of either side was whether Indian spiritual
forces could affect Europeans, and vice versa. (As an experiment, Cotton Mather, a
celebrated New England minister, tried to exorcise the “daemons in a possessed young
woman” with incantations in Massachusett. To his satisfaction, the results demonstrated
empirically that Indian magic had no effect on Christian devils.) Until the sickness
Massasoit had directly ruled a community of several thousand and held sway over a
confederation of as many as twenty thousand. Now his group was reduced to sixty people
and the entire confederation to fewer than a thousand. The Wampanoag, wrote Salisbury,
the Smith historian, came to the obvious logical conclusion: “their deities had allied
against them.”
The Pilgrims held similar views. Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the
plague to “the good hand of God,” which “favored our beginnings” by “sweeping away
great multitudes of the natives…that he might make room for us.” Indeed, more than fifty
of the first colonial villages in New England were located on Indian communities
emptied by disease. The epidemic, Gorges said, left the land “without any [people] to
disturb or appease our free and peaceable possession thereof, from when we may justly
conclude, that GOD made the way to effect his work.”
Much as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands in one of
Europe’s richest cities, prompted spiritual malaise across Europe, the New England
epidemic shattered the Wampanoag’s sense that they lived in balance with an intelligible
46

world. On top of that, the massive death toll created a political crisis. Because the
hostility between the Wampanoag and the neighboring Narragansett had restricted
contact between them, the disease had not spread to the latter. Massasoit’s people were
not only beset by loss, they were in danger of subjugation.
In this engraving taken from a John White watercolor of an East Coast village, the
palisaded wall suggests that warfare was common enough to merit the considerable labor
of cutting down many trees with stone tools, but the forces were not large enough to
require moats, stone walls, earthen embankments, or any other big defensive fortification.
After learning about the epidemic, the distraught Tisquantum first returned with
Dermer to southern Maine. Apparently concluding he was never going to meet Rowcraft,
Dermer decided in 1620 to make another pass at New England. Tisquantum returned, too,
but not with Dermer. Instead he walked home—the long, risky journey he had wanted to
47

avoid. In the interim, yet another English expedition had attacked the Wampanoag,
killing several without apparent provocation. Understandably enraged, Indians attacked
Dermer several times on his journey south; he was eventually slain on Martha’s Vineyard
by another former Indian abductee. For his part, Tisquantum was seized on his journey
home, perhaps because of his association with the hated English, and sent to Massasoit as
a captive.
As he had before, Tisquantum talked his way out of a jam. This time he extolled
the English, filling Massasoit’s ears with tales of their cities, their great numbers, their
powerful technology. Tisquantum said, according to a colonist who knew him, that if the
sachem “Could make [the] English his Friends then [any] Enemies yt weare to[o] strong
for him”—in other words, the Narragansett—“would be Constrained to bowe to him.”
The sachem listened without trust. Within a few months, word came that a party of
English had set up shop at Patuxet. The Wampanoag observed them suffer through the
first punishing winter. Eventually Massasoit concluded that he possibly should ally with
them—compared to the Narragansett, they were the lesser of two evils. Still, only when
the need for a translator became unavoidable did he allow Tisquantum to meet the
Pilgrims.
Massasoit had considerable experience with Europeans—his father had sent
Martin Pring on his way seventeen years before. But that was before the epidemic, when
Massasoit had the option of expelling them. Now he told the Pilgrims that he was willing
to leave them in peace (a bluff, one assumes, since driving them away would have taxed
his limited resources). But in return he wanted the colonists’ assistance with the
Narragansett.
To the Pilgrims, the Indians’ motives for the deal were obvious. They wanted
European technology on their side. In particular, they wanted guns. “He thinks we may
be [of] some strength to him,” Winslow said later, “for our pieces [guns] are terrible to
them.”
In fact Massasoit had a subtler plan. It is true that European technology dazzled
Native Americans on first encounter. But the relative positions of the two sides were
closer than commonly believed. Contemporary research suggests that indigenous peoples
in New England were not technologically inferior to the British—or, rather, that terms
like “superior” and “inferior” do not readily apply to the relationship between Indian and
European technology.
Guns are an example. As Chaplin, the Harvard historian, has argued, New
England Indians were indeed disconcerted by their first experiences with European guns:
the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible projectile. But the natives soon learned that
most of the British were terrible shots, from lack of practice—their guns were little more
than noisemakers. Even for a crack shot, a seventeenth-century gun had fewer advantages
over a longbow than may be supposed. Colonists in Jamestown taunted the Powhatan in
1607 with a target they believed impervious to an arrow shot. To the colonists’ dismay,
an Indian sank an arrow into it a foot deep, “which was strange, being that a Pistoll could
not pierce it.” To regain the upper hand, the English set up a target made of steel. This
time the archer “burst his arrow all to pieces.” The Indian was “in a great rage”; he
realized, one assumes, that the foreigners had cheated. When the Powhatan later captured
John Smith, Chaplin notes, Smith broke his pistol rather than reveal to his captors “the
awful truth that it could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly.”
48

At the same time, Europeans were impressed by American technology. The
foreigners, coming from a land plagued by famine, were awed by maize, which yields
more grain per acre than any other cereal. Indian moccasins were so much more
comfortable and waterproof than stiff, moldering English boots that when colonists had
to walk for long distances their Indian companions often pitied their discomfort and gave
them new footwear. Indian birchbark canoes were faster and more maneuverable than
any small European boat. In 1605 three laughing Indians in a canoe literally paddled
circles round the lumbering dory paddled by traveler George Weymouth and seven other
men. Despite official disapproval, the stunned British eagerly exchanged knives and guns
for Indian canoes. Bigger European ships with sails had some advantages. Indians got
hold of them through trade and shipwreck, and trained themselves to be excellent sailors.
By the time of the epidemic, a rising proportion of the shipping traffic along the New
England coast was of indigenous origin.
Reading Massasoit’s motives at this distance is a chancy business. But it seems
likely that he did not want to ally with the foreigners primarily for their guns, as they
believed. Although the sachem doubtless relished the possibility of additional firepower,
he probably wanted more to confront the Narragansett with the unappetizing prospect of
attacking one group of English people at the same time that their main trading partners
were other English people. Faced with the possibility of disrupting their favored position
as middlemen, the Narragansett might think twice before staging an incursion. Massasoit,
if this interpretation is correct, was trying to incorporate the Pilgrims into the web of
native politics. Not long before Massasoit had expelled foreigners who stayed too long in
Wampanoag territory. But with the entire confederation now smaller than one of its
former communities, the best option seemed to be allowing the Pilgrims to remain. It was
a drastic, even fatal, decision.
MACHINATIONS
Tisquantum worked to prove his value to the Pilgrims. He was so successful that
when some anti-British Indians abducted him the colonists sent out a military expedition
to get him back. They did not stop to ask themselves why he might be making himself
essential, given how difficult it must have been to live in the ghost of his childhood
home. In retrospect, the answer seems clear: the alternative to staying in Plymouth was
returning to Massasoit and renewed captivity.
Recognizing that the Pilgrims would be unlikely to keep him around forever,
Tisquantum decided to gather together the few survivors of Patuxet and reconstitute the
old community at a site near Plymouth. More ambitious still, he hoped to use his
influence on the English to make this new Patuxet the center of the Wampanoag
confederation, thereby stripping the sachemship from Massasoit, who had held him
captive. To accomplish these goals, he intended to play the Indians and English against
each other.
The scheme was risky, not least because the ever-suspicious Massasoit sent one of
his pniese, Hobamok, to Plymouth as a monitor. (Hobamok, like Tisquantum, apparently
adopted a new name in his dealings with the British; “Hobamok” was the source of evil
in Wampanoag cosmology.) Sometimes the two men were able to work together, as when
Hobamok and Tisquantum helped the Pilgrims negotiate a treaty with the Massachusett to
49

the north. They also helped establish a truce with the Nauset of Cape Cod after Bradford
promised to pay back the losses caused by their earlier grave robbing.
By fall the settlers’ situation was secure enough that they held a feast of
thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with ninety people, most of them young men with
weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and firing their guns in the
air in a manner intended to convey menace. Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of
food, and complained about the Narragansett. Ecce Thanksgiving.
All the while, Tisquantum covertly tried to persuade other Wampanoag that he
was better able to protect them against the Narragansett than Massasoit. In case of attack,
Tisquantum claimed, he could respond with an equal number of Indian troops—and the
Pilgrims, who might be able to intimidate the enemy. He evidently believed that the
Narragansett did not have enough experience with European guns to know that they were
not as fearsome as they first appeared. To advance his case, Tisquantum told other
Indians that the foreigners had hidden away casefuls of the agent that caused the
epidemic, and that he could manipulate them into unleashing it.
Even as Tisquantum attempted to foment Indian distrust of Massasoit, he told the
colonists that Massasoit was going to double-cross them by leading a joint attack on
Plymouth with the Narragansett. And he attempted to trick the Pilgrims into attacking the
sachem.
In the spring of 1622 Tisquantum accompanied a delegation to the Massachusett
in Boston Harbor. Minutes after they left, Bradford later recalled, one of the surviving
Patuxet “came running in seeming great fear” to inform the settlers that the Narragansett
“and he thought also Massasoit” were planning to attack. The idea clearly was that the
colonists, enraged by the putative assault, would rise up and smite Massasoit. Tisquantum
would be away, so his hands would seem clean. Instead everything went awry. In Indian
villages people could only be summoned by shouting; once a canoe had gone a few
hundred yards, it could not readily be called back. But when the news came of the
impending attack, Bradford ordered the Pilgrims to fire a cannon to order back the
expedition and Tisquantum. Meanwhile Hobamok, who had acquired some English,
indignantly denied the story. In a move that Tisquantum apparently had not anticipated,
Bradford dispatched Hobamok’s wife to Massasoit’s home to find out what the sachem
was doing. She reported that “all was quiet.” Actually, this wasn’t entirely true.
Massasoit was furious—at Tisquantum. He demanded that the Pilgrims send their
translator to him for a quick execution.
Bradford refused; Tisquantum’s language skills were too vital. Tisquantum is one
of my subjects, Massasoit said. You Pilgrims have no jurisdiction over him. And he
offered a cache of fur to sweeten the deal. When the colony still would not surrender
Tisquantum, Massasoit sent a messenger with a knife and told Bradford to lop off
Tisquantum’s hands and head. To make his displeasure manifest, he summoned
Hobamok home and cut off contact with the Pilgrims. Nervous, the colonists began
building defensive fortifications. Worse, almost no rain fell between mid-May and
mid-July, withering their crops. Because the Wampanoag had stopped trading with them,
the Pilgrims would not be able to supplement their harvest.
Tisquantum, afraid of Massasoit’s wrath, was unable to take a step outside of
Plymouth without an escort. Nonetheless, he accompanied Bradford on a trip to southeast
Cape Cod to negotiate another pact. They were on the way home when Tisquantum
50

suddenly became sick. He died in a few days, his hopes in ruins. In the next decade tens
of thousands of Europeans came to Massachusetts. Massasoit shepherded his people
through the wave of settlement, and the pact he signed with Plymouth lasted for more
than fifty years. Only in 1675 did one of his sons, angered at being pushed around by
colonists’ laws, launch what was perhaps an inevitable attack. Indians from dozens of
groups joined in. The conflict, brutal and sad, tore through New England.
The Europeans won. Historians attribute part of the victory to Indian
unwillingness to match the European tactic of massacring whole villages. Another reason
for the newcomers’ triumph was that by that time they outnumbered the natives. Groups
like the Narragansett, which had been spared by the epidemic of 1616, were crushed by a
smallpox epidemic in 1633. A third to half of the remaining Indians in New England
died. The People of the First Light could avoid or adapt to European technology but not
European disease. Their societies were destroyed by weapons their opponents could not
control and did not even know they had.
51

In the Land of Four Quarters
“LIKE A CLUB RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES”
In the early 1960s, Henry F. Dobyns, a young anthropologist working on a
rural-aid project in Peru, dispatched assistants to storehouses of old records throughout
the country. Dobyns himself traveled to the central cathedral in Lima. Entering the nave,
visitors passed by a chapel on the right-hand side that contained the mummified body of
Francisco Pizarro, the romantic, thuggish Spaniard who conquered Peru in the sixteenth
century. Or, rather, they passed by a chapel that was thought to contain the conqueror’s
mummified body; the actual remains turned up years later, stashed inside two metal
boxes beneath the main altar. Dobyns was not visiting the cathedral as a sightseer.
Instead, he descended into the structure’s basement—cold, dank, poorly lighted—to
inspect birth and death registers kept there.
Dobyns belonged to a research team led by his doctoral advisor, Allan R.
Holmberg of Cornell, the Holmberg after whom I have unkindly named Holmberg’s
Mistake. Holmberg had persuaded Cornell to let him lease an old colonial estate in rural
Peru (the Carnegie Corporation, a charitable foundation despite its name, provided the
funds). The estate included an entire village, whose inhabitants, most of them Indian,
were its sharecroppers. “It was really a form of serfdom,” Dobyns told me. “The villagers
were just heartbreakingly poor.” Holmberg planned to test strategies for raising their
incomes. Because land tenure was a contentious issue in Peru, he had asked Dobyns to
finalize the lease and learn more about the estate’s history. With his adjutants, Dobyns
visited a dozen archives, including those in the cathedral.
Dobyns had been dipping his toe into archival research for more than a decade,
with results he found intriguing. His first foray into the past occurred in 1953, while he
was visiting his parents in Phoenix, Arizona, during a school break. A friend, Paul H.
Ezell, asked him for some help with his doctoral thesis. The thesis concerned the
adoption of Spanish culture by the Pima Indians, who occupy a 372,000-acre reservation
south of Phoenix. Many of the region’s colonial-era records survived in the Mexican
town of Altar, in the border state of Sonora. Ezell wanted to examine those records, and
asked Dobyns to come along. One weekend the two men drove from Phoenix to Nogales,
on the border. From Nogales, they went south, west, and up into the highlands, often on
dirt roads, to Altar.
Then a huddle of small houses surrounding a dozen little stores, Altar was,
Dobyns said, “the end of the earth.” Local women still covered their heads with shawls.
Gringo visitors, few in number, tended to be prospectors chasing rumors of lost gold
mines in the mountains.
After surprising the parish priest by their interest in his records, the two young
men hauled into the church their principal research tool: a Contura portable copier, an
ancestor to the Xerox photocopier that required freshly stirred chemicals for each use.
The machine strained the technological infrastructure of Altar, which had electricity for
only six hours a day. Under flickering light, the two men pored through centuries-old
52

ledgers, the pages beautifully preserved by the dry desert air. Dobyns was struck by the
disparity between the large number of burials recorded at the parish and the far smaller
number of baptisms. Almost all the deaths were from diseases brought by Europeans. The
Spaniards arrived and then Indians died—in huge numbers, at incredible rates. It hit him,
Dobyns told me, “like a club right between the eyes.”
At first he did nothing about his observation. Historical demography was not
supposed to be his field. Six years later, in 1959, he surveyed more archives in
Hermosilla and found the same disparity. By this point he had almost finished his
doctorate at Cornell and had been selected for Holmberg’s project. The choice was
almost haphazard: Dobyns had never been to Peru.
Peru, Dobyns learned, was one of the world’s cultural wellsprings, a place as
important to the human saga as the Fertile Crescent. Yet the area’s significance had been
scarcely appreciated outside the Andes, partly because the Spaniards so thoroughly
ravaged Inka culture, and partly because the Inka themselves, wanting to puff up their
own importance, had actively concealed the glories of the cultures before them.
Incredibly, the first full history of the fall of the Inka empire did not appear until more
than three hundred years after the events it chronicled: William H. Prescott’s History of
the Conquest of Peru, published in 1847. Prescott’s thunderous cadences remain a
pleasure to read, despite the author’s firmly stated belief, typical for his time, in the moral
inferiority of the natives. But the book had no successor. More than a century later, when
Dobyns went to Lima, Prescott’s was still the only complete account. (A fine history,
John Hemming’s Conquest of the Incas, appeared in 1970. But it, too, has had no
successor, despite a wealth of new information.) “The Inka were largely ignored because
the entire continent of South America was largely ignored,” Patricia Lyon, an
anthropologist at the Institute for Andean Studies, in Berkeley, California, explained to
me. Until the end of colonialism, she suggested, researchers tended to work in their own
countries’ possessions. “The British were in Africa, along with the Germans and French.
The Dutch were in Asia, and nobody was in South America,” because most of its nations
were independent. The few researchers who did examine Andean societies were often
sidetracked into ideological warfare. The Inka practiced a form of central planning, which
led scholars into a sterile Cold War squabble about whether they were actually socialists
avant la lettre in a communal Utopia or a dire precursor to Stalinist Russia.
Given the lack of previous investigation, it may have been inevitable that when
Dobyns traced births and deaths in Lima he would be staking out new ground. He
collected every book on Peruvian demography he could find. And he dipped into his own
money to pay Cornell project workers to explore the cathedral archives and the national
archives of Peru and the municipal archives of Lima. Slowly tallying mortality and
natality figures, Dobyns continued to be impressed by what he found. Like any scholar,
he eventually wrote an article about what he had learned. But by the time his article came
out, in 1963, he had realized that his findings applied far beyond Peru.
The Inka and the Wampanoag were as different as Turks and Swedes. But Dobyns
discovered, in effect, that their separate battles with Spain and England followed a similar
biocultural template, one that explained the otherwise perplexing fact that every Indian
culture, large or small, eventually succumbed to Europe. (Shouldn’t there have been some
exceptions?) And then, reasoning backward in time from this master narrative, he
proposed a new way to think about Native American societies, one that transformed not
53

only our understanding of life before Columbus arrived, but our picture of the continents
themselves.
TAWANTINSUYU
In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty
China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel
or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting
Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely
known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a
staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St.
Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every imaginable type of terrain, from the
rainforest of upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast and the
twenty-thousand-foot peaks of the Andes between. “If imperial potential is judged in
terms of environmental adaptability,” wrote the Oxford historian Felipe
Fernández-Armesto, “the Inka were the most impressive empire builders of their day.”
The Inka goal was to knit the scores of different groups in western South
America—some as rich as the Inka themselves, some poor and disorganized, all speaking
different languages—into a single bureaucratic framework under the direct rule of the
emperor. The unity was not merely political: the Inka wanted to meld together the area’s
religion, economics, and arts. Their methods were audacious, brutal, and efficient: they
removed entire populations from their homelands; shuttled them around the biggest road
system on the planet, a mesh of stone-paved thoroughfares totaling as much as 25,000
miles; and forced them to work with other groups, using only Runa Sumi, the Inka
language, on massive, faraway state farms and construction projects.
*7 To monitor this
cyclopean enterprise, the Inka developed a form of writing unlike any other, sequences of
knots on strings that formed a binary code reminiscent of today’s computer languages
(see Appendix B, “Talking Knots”). So successful were the Inka at remolding their
domain, according to the late John H. Rowe, an eminent archaeologist at the University
of California at Berkeley, that Andean history “begins, not with the Wars of [South
American] Independence or with the Spanish Conquest, but with the organizing genius of
[empire founder] Pachakuti in the fifteenth century.”
54

TAWANTINSUYU The Land of the Four Quarters, 1527 A.D.
Highland Peru is as extraordinary as the Inka themselves. It is the only place on
earth, the Cornell anthropologist John Murra wrote, “where millions [of people] insist,
against all apparent logic, on living at 10,000 or even 14,000 feet above sea level.
Nowhere else have people lived for so many thousands of years in such visibly
vulnerable circumstances.” And nowhere else have people living at such heights—in
places where most crops won’t grow, earthquakes and landslides are frequent, and
extremes of weather are the norm—repeatedly created technically advanced, long-lasting
civilizations. The Inka homeland, uniquely high, was also uniquely steep, with slopes of
more than sixty-five degrees from the horizontal. (The steepest street in San Francisco,
famed for its nearly undrivable hills, is thirty-one-and-a-half degrees.) And it was
uniquely narrow; the distance from the Pacific shore to the mountaintops is in most
55

places less than seventy-five miles and in many less than fifty. Ecologists postulate that
the first large-scale human societies tended to arise where, as Jared Diamond of the
University of California at Los Angeles put it, geography provided “a wide range of
altitudes and topographies within a short distance.” One such place is the Fertile
Crescent, where the mountains of western Iran and the Dead Sea, the lowest place on
earth, bracket the Tigris and Euphrates river systems. Another is Peru. In the short
traverse from mountain to ocean, travelers pass through twenty of the world’s thirty-four
principal types of environment.
Highland Peru, captured in this image of the Inka ruin Wiñay Wayna by the
indigenous Andean photographer Martín Chambi (1891–1973), is the only place on earth
where people living at such inhospitable altitudes repeatedly created materially
sophisticated societies.
To survive in this steep, narrow hodgepodge of ecosystems, Andean communities
usually sent out representatives and colonies to live up- or downslope in places with
resources unavailable at home. Fish and shellfish from the ocean; beans, squash, and
cotton from coastal river valleys; maize, potatoes, and the Andean grain quinoa from the
foothills; llamas and alpacas for wool and meat in the heights—each area had something
to contribute. Villagers in the satellite settlements exchanged products with the center,
sending beans uphill and obtaining llama jerky in return, all the while retaining their
citizenship in a homeland they rarely saw. Combining the fruits of many ecosystems,
Andean cultures both enjoyed a better life than they could have wrested from any single
place and spread out the risk from the area’s frequent natural catastrophes. Murra
56

invented a name for this mode of existence: “vertical archipelagoes.”
Verticality helped Andean cultures survive but also pushed them to stay small.
Because the mountains impeded north-south communication, it was much easier to
coordinate the flow of goods and services east to west. As a result the region for most of
its history was a jumble of small- and medium-scale cultures, isolated from all but their
neighbors. Three times, though, cultures rose to dominate the Andes, uniting previously
separate groups under a common banner. The first period of hegemony was that of
Chavín, which from about 700 B.C. to the dawn of the Christian era controlled the central
coast of Peru and the adjacent mountains. The next, beginning after Chavín’s decline,
was the time of two great powers: the technologically expert empire of Wari, which held
sway over the coastline previously under Chavín; and Tiwanaku, centered on Lake
Titicaca, the great alpine lake on the Peru-Bolivia border. (I briefly discussed Wari and
Tiwanaku earlier, and will return to them—and to the rest of the immense pre-Inka
tradition—later.) After Wari and Tiwanaku collapsed, at the end of the first millennium,
the Andes split into sociopolitical fragments and with one major exception remained that
way for more than three centuries. Then came the Inka.
The Inka empire, the greatest state ever seen in the Andes, was also the shortest
lived. It began in the fifteenth century and lasted barely a hundred years before being
smashed by Spain.
As conquerors, the Inka were unlikely. Even in 1350 they were still an
unimportant part of the political scene in the central Andes, and newcomers at that. In
one of the oral tales recorded by the Spanish Jesuit Bernabé Cobo, the Inka originated
with a family of four brothers and four sisters who left Lake Titicaca for reasons
unknown and wandered until they came upon what would become the future Inka capital,
Qosqo (Cusco, in Spanish). Cobo, who sighed over the “extreme ignorance and
barbarity” of the Indians, dismissed such stories as “ludicrous.” Nonetheless,
archaeological investigation has generally borne them out: the Inka seem indeed to have
migrated to Qosqo from somewhere else, perhaps Lake Titicaca, around 1200 A.D.
The colonial account of Inka history closest to indigenous sources is by Juan de
Betanzos, a Spanish commoner who rose to marry an Inka princess and become the most
prominent translator for the colonial government. Based on interviews with his in-laws,
Betanzos estimated that when the Inka showed up in the Qosqo region “more than two
hundred” small groups were already there. Qosqo itself, where they settled, was a hamlet
“of about thirty small, humble straw houses.”
Archaeological evidence suggests that the Inka gradually became more powerful.
The apparent turning point in their fortunes occurred when they somehow made enemies
of another group, the Chanka, who eventually attacked them. This unremarkable
provincial squabble had momentous consequences.
According to a widely quoted chronology by the sixteenth-century cleric Miguel
Cabello Balboa, the Chanka offensive took place in 1438. The Inka leader at that time
was Wiraqocha Inka.
*8 “A valiant prince,” according to Cobo, Wiraqocha Inka had a
“warlike” nature even as a young man and vowed that after taking the throne “he would
conquer half the world.” Perhaps so, but he fled the Chanka attack with three of his four
sons, including his designated successor, Inka Urqon. A younger son, Inka Cusi Yupanki,
refused to run. Instead he fought the Chanka with such bravery that (according to the
legend) the very stones rose up to join the fray. Inka Yupanki won the battle, capturing
57

many Chanka leaders. Later he skinned them in celebration—Pizarro saw the trophies on
display. But first Inka Yupanki presented the captives to his father, so that Wiraqocha
Inka could perform the victory ritual of wiping his feet on their bodies.
Fearing that Inka Yupanki was becoming too big for his britches, Wiraqocha Inka
chose that moment to remind his younger son of his subordinate status. The foot-wiping
honor, he proclaimed, actually belonged to the next Inka: Inka Urqon. “To this,”
Betanzos wrote, “Inka Yupanki answered that he was begging his father to tread on the
prisoners, that he had not won the victory so that such women as Inka Urqon and the rest
of his brothers could step on them.” A heated argument led to a standoff. In a
Shakespearian move, Wiraqocha Inka decided to settle the issue by murdering his
inconvenient younger son. (It was “a crazy impulse,” one of Wiraqocha Inka’s generals
later explained.) Inka Yupanki was tipped off and the scheme failed. The humiliated
Wiraqocha Inka went into exile while Inka Yupanki returned in triumph to Qosqo,
renamed himself Pachakuti (“World-shaker”), and proclaimed that the ruling Inka
families were descended from the sun. Then he went about conquering everything in
sight.
Hey, wait a minute! the reader may be saying. This family story makes such
terrific melodrama that it seems reasonable to wonder whether it actually happened. After
all, every known written account of the Inka was set down after the conquest, a century or
more after Pachakuti’s rise. And these differ from each other, sometimes dramatically,
reflecting the authors’ biases and ignorance, and their informants’ manipulation of history
to cast a flattering light on their family lines. For these reasons, some scholars dismiss the
chronicles entirely. Others note that both the Inka and the Spaniards had long traditions
of record-keeping. By and large the chroniclers seem to have been conscious of their
roles as witnesses and tried to live up to them. Their versions of events broadly agree
with each other. As a result, most scholars judiciously use the colonial accounts, as I try
to do here.
After taking the reins of state, Pachakuti spent the next twenty-five years
expanding the empire from central highland Peru to Lake Titicaca and beyond. His
methods were subtler and more economical with direct force than one might expect, as
exemplified by the slow takeover of the coastal valley of Chincha. In about 1450
Pachakuti dispatched an army to Chincha under Qhapaq Yupanki (Ka-pok Yu-panki,
meaning roughly “Munificent Honored One”), a kind of adopted brother. Marching into
the valley with thousands of troops, Qhapaq Yupanki informed the fearful local gentry
that he wanted nothing from Chincha whatsoever. “He said that he was the son of the
Sun,” according to the report of two Spanish priests who investigated the valley’s history
in the 1550s. “And that he had come for their good and for everyone’s and that he did not
want their silver nor their gold nor their daughters.” Far from taking the land by force, in
fact, the Inka general would give them “all that he was carrying.” And he practically
buried the Chincha leadership under piles of valuables. In return for his generosity, the
general asked only for a little appreciation, preferably in the form of a large house from
which the Inka could operate, and a staff of servants to cook, clean, and make the things
needed by the outpost. And when Qhapaq Yupanki left, he asked Chincha to keep
expressing its gratitude by sending craftspeople and goods to Qosqo.
A decade later Pachakuti sent out another army to the valley, this one led by his
son and heir, Thupa Inka Yupanki (“Royal Honored Inka”). Thupa Inka closeted himself
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with the local leadership and laid out many inspired ideas for the valley’s betterment, all
of which were gratefully endorsed. Following the Inka template, the local leaders drafted
the entire populace into service, dividing households by sex and age into cohorts, each
with its own leader who reported to the leader of the next larger group. “Everything was
in order for the people to know who was in control,” the Spanish priests wrote. Thupa
Inka delegated tasks to the mobilized population: hewing roads to link Chincha to other
areas controlled by the Inka, building a new palace for the Inka, and tending the fields set
aside for the Inka. Thupa Inka apparently left the area in charge of his brother, who
continued managing its gratitude.
The next visit came from Pachakuti’s grandson, probably in the 1490s. With him
came escalating demands for land and service—the veneer of reciprocity was fading. By
that point the Chincha had little alternative but to submit. They were surrounded by Inka
satrapies; their economy was enmeshed with the imperial machinery; they had hundreds
or thousands of people doing the empire’s bidding. The Chincha elite, afraid to take on
the Inka army, always chose compliance over valor, and were rewarded with plum
positions in the colonial government. But their domain had ceased to exist as an
independent entity.
In 1976 Edward N. Luttwak, now at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, in Washington, D.C., published a short, provocative book about imperial Rome
that distinguished between territorial and hegemonic empires. Territorial empires directly
occupy territories with their armies, throw out the old rulers, and annex the land. In
hegemonic empires, the internal affairs of conquered areas remain in the hands of their
original rulers, who become vassals. Territorial empires are tightly controlled but costly
to maintain; hegemonic empires are inexpensive to maintain, because the original local
rulers incur the costs of administration, but the loose tie between master and vassal
encourages rebellion. Every conquest-minded state is a mixture of both, but all Native
American empires leaned toward the hegemonic. Without horses, Indian soldiers
unavoidably traveled slower than European or Asian soldiers. If brigades were tied up as
occupiers, they could not be reassigned quickly. As a result, the Inka were almost forced
to co-opt local rulers instead of displacing them. They did so with a vengeance.
Pachakuti gave command of the military to his son Thupa Inka in 1463 and turned
his attention to totally rebuilding Qosqo in imperial style, in the process becoming one of
history’s great urban planners. Although he drew on Andean aesthetic traditions,
Pachakuti put his own stamp on Inka art and architecture. Whereas the buildings of
Sumer and Assyria were covered with brilliant mosaics and splendid pictorial murals, the
Inka style was severe, abstract, stripped down to geometric forms—startlingly
contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian critic César Paternosto, such major
twentieth-century painters as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko were
inspired by Inka art.)
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Inka masonry amazed the conquistadors, who could not understand how they put
together such enormous stones without mortar or draft animals. And it was astonishingly
durable—the U.S. explorer Hiram Bingham photographed the citadel of Machu Piqchu in
1913, and found it in near-perfect condition despite four centuries of neglect.
At the heart of the new Qosqo was the plaza of Awkaypata, 625 feet by 550 feet,
carpeted almost in its entirety with white sand carried in from the Pacific and raked daily
by the city’s army of workers. Monumental villas and temples surrounded the space on
three sides, their walls made from immense blocks of stone so precisely cut and fit that
Pizarro’s younger cousin Pedro, who accompanied the conqueror as a page, reported
“that the point of a pin could not have been inserted in one of the joints.” Across their
facades ran enormous plates of polished gold. When the alpine sun filled Awkaypata,
with its boldly delineated horizontal plain of white sand and sloping sheets of gold, the
space became an amphitheater for the exaltation of light.
In Pachakuti’s grand design, Awkaypata was the center of the empire—and the
cosmos. From the great plaza radiated four highways that demarcated the four
asymmetrical sectors into which he divided the empire, Tawantinsuyu, “Land of the Four
Quarters.” To the Inka, the quarters echoed the heavenly order. The Milky Way, a vast
celestial river in Andean cosmology, crosses the Peruvian sky at an angle of about
twenty-eight degrees to the earth’s orbit. For six months the stream of stars slants across
the sky from, so to speak, northeast to southwest; the other six months it slants from
southeast to northwest. The transition roughly coincides with the transition between dry
and wet seasons—the time when the Milky Way releases life-giving water to
PachaMama, Mother Earth—and divides the heavens into four quarters. Awkaypata,
reflecting this pattern, was the axis of the universe.
Not only that, Qosqo was the center of a second spiritual pattern. Radiating out
from Awkaypata was a drunken spiderweb of forty-one crooked, spiritually powerful
lines, known as zeq’e, that linked holy features of the landscape: springs, tombs, caves,
shrines, fields, stones. About four hundred of these wak’a (shrines, more or less) existed
around Qosqo—the landscape around the capital was charged with telluric power. (The
zeq’e also played a role in the Inka calendar, which apparently consisted of forty-one
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eight-day weeks.) So complexly interrelated was the network of wak’a and zeq’e,
Columbia University archaeologist Terence D’Altroy has written, “that many otherwise
diligent scholars have been reduced to scratching their heads and trusting someone else’s
judgement.” Each wak’a had its own meaning, relative status, social affiliation, and set of
ceremonial uses. One big stone outside town was believed to be the petrified body of one
of the original Inka brothers; Inka armies often carried it with them, dressed in fine togs,
as a kind of good-luck talisman. To keep track of the florid abundance of shrines and
lines, Cobo observed, the empire “had more than a thousand men in the city of Qosqo
who did nothing but remember these things.”
Around the Inka capital of Qosqo (modern Cusco) were more than four hundred
wak’a, places in the landscape charged with spiritual power. Many of these were stones,
some carved in elaborate representations, perhaps of the areas they influenced.
Not only did Pachakuti reconfigure the capital, he laid out the institutions that
characterized Tawantinsuyu itself. For centuries, villagers had spent part of their time
working in teams on community projects. Alternately bullying and cajoling, Pachakuti
expanded the service obligation unrecognizably. In Tawantinsuyu, he decreed, all land
and property belonged to the state (indeed, to the Inka himself). Peasants thus had to
work periodically for the empire as farmers, herders, weavers, masons, artisans, miners,
or soldiers. Often crews spent months away from home. While they were on the road, the
state fed, clothed, and housed them—all from goods supplied by other work crews.
Conscripts built dams, terraces, and irrigation canals; they grew crops on state land and
raised herds on state pastures and made pots in state factories and stocked hundreds of
state warehouses; they paved the highways and supplied the runners and llamas carrying
messages and goods along them. Dictatorially extending Andean verticality, the
imperium shuttled people and materiel in and out of every Andean crevice.
Not the least surprising feature of this economic system was that it functioned
without money. True, the lack of currency did not surprise the Spanish invaders—much
of Europe did without money until the eighteenth century. But the Inka did not even have
markets. Economists would predict that this nonmarket economy—vertical socialism, it
has been called—should produce gross inefficiencies. These surely occurred, but the
errors were of surplus, not want. The Spanish invaders were stunned to find warehouses
overflowing with untouched cloth and supplies. But to the Inka the brimming coffers
signified prestige and plenty; it was all part of the plan. Most important, Tawantinsuyu
“managed to eradicate hunger,” the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa noted. Though
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no fan of the Inka, he conceded that “only a very small number of empires throughout the
whole world have succeeded in achieving this feat.”
When Tawantinsuyu swallowed a new area, the Inka forcibly imported settlers
from other, faraway areas, often in large numbers, and gave them land. The newcomers
were encouraged to keep their own dress and customs rather than integrate into the host
population. To communicate, both groups were forced to use Ruma Suni, the language of
their conquerors. In the short run this practice created political tensions that the Inka
manipulated to control both groups. In the long term it would have (if successful) eroded
the distinctions among cultures and forged a homogeneous new nation in the imprint of
Tawantinsuyu. Five centuries later the wholesale reshuffling of populations became an
infamous trademark of Stalin and Mao. But the scale on which the Inka moved the pieces
around the ethnic checkerboard would have excited their admiration. Incredibly,
foreigners came to outnumber natives in many places. It is possible that ethnic clashes
would eventually have caused Tawantinsuyu to implode, Yugoslavia-style. But if Pizarro
had not interrupted, the Inka might have created a monolithic culture as enduring as
China.
THE GILDED LITTER OF THE INKA
How did Pizarro do it? Sooner or later, everyone who studies the Inka confronts
this question. Henry Dobyns wondered about it, too. The empire was as populous, rich,
and well organized as any in history. But no other fell before such a small force: Pizarro
had only 168 men and 62 horses. Researchers have often wondered whether the Inka
collapse betokens a major historical lesson. The answer is yes, but the lesson was not
grasped until recently.
The basic history of the empire was known well enough by the time Dobyns
began reading the old colonial accounts. According to Cabello Balboa’s chronology,
Pachakuti died peacefully in 1471. His son Thupa Inka, long the military commander,
now took the imperial “crown”—a multicolored braid, twisted around the skull like a
headband, from which hung a red tasseled fringe that fell across the forehead. Carried on
a golden litter—the Inka did not walk in public—Thupa Inka appeared with such majesty,
according to the voyager Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, that “people left the roads along
which he had to pass and, ascending the hills on either side, worshipped and adored” him
by “pulling out their eyebrows and eyelashes.” Minions collected and stored every object
he touched, food waste included, to ensure that no lesser persons could profane these
objects with their touch. The ground was too dirty to receive the Inka’s saliva so he
always spat into the hand of a courtier. The courtier wiped the spittle with a special cloth
and stored it for safekeeping. Once a year everything touched by the Inka—clothing,
garbage, bedding, saliva—was ceremonially burned.
Thupa Inka inaugurated the Inka custom of marrying his sister. In fact, Thupa
Inka may have married two of his sisters. The practice was genetically unsound but
logically consistent. Only close relatives of the Inka were seen as of sufficient purity to
produce his heir. As Inkas grew in grandeur, more purity was required. Finally only a
sister would do. The Inka’s sister-wives accompanied him on military forays, along with
a few hundred or thousand of his subordinate wives. The massive scale of these domestic
arrangements seems not to have impeded his imperial progress. By his death in 1493,
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Thupa Inka had sent his armies deep into Ecuador and Chile, doubling the size of
Tawantinsuyu again. In terms of area conquered during his lifetime, he was in the league
of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan.
TAWANTINSUYU
Expansion of the Inka Empire, 1438–1527 A.D.
Tawantinsuyu is known to have risen and fallen with breathtaking rapidity, but the exact
chronology of its trajectory is disputed. Most researchers regard the account of Miguel
Cabello Balboa as approximately correct. It is the source for this map, though the reader
is cautioned against regarding it as either exact or universally accepted.
Thupa Inka’s death set off a fight for the royal fringe. Tawantinsuyu did not have
strict succession rules. Instead the Inka selected the son he thought most qualified. Thupa
Inka had more than sixty sons from all of his wives, according to Sarmiento de Gamboa,
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so he had a lot of choice. Alas, Thupa Inka apparently selected one son but then changed
his mind on his deathbed and selected another. Factions formed around each son, leading
to a melée. The first son was banished or killed and the second took the name Wayna
Qhapaq (Why-na Ka-pok) and became the Inka. Because the new Inka was still a teenager
(his name means “Munificent Youth”), two of his uncles served as regents. One uncle
tried to usurp power but was killed by the other. Eventually the Inka grew old enough to
take the reins. Among his first official acts was killing two of his own brothers to avoid
future family problems. Then he, like his father, married his sister.
Wayna Qhapaq was not a military adventurer like his father. He initially seems to
have viewed his role mainly as one of consolidation, rather than conquest, perhaps
because Tawantinsuyu was approaching the geographic limits of
governability—communication down the long north-south spine of the empire was
stretched to the limit. Much of Wayna Qhapaq’s time was devoted to organizing the
empire’s public works projects. Often these were more political than practical. Because
the Inka believed that idleness fomented rebellion, the Spanish traveler Pedro Cieza de
León reported, he ordered unemployed work brigades “to move a mountain from one spot
to another” for no practical purpose. Cieza de León once came upon three different
highways running between the same two towns, each built by a different Inka.
Consolidation was completed in about 1520. Wayna Qhapaq then marched to
Ecuador at the head of an army, intending to expand the empire to the north. It was a
journey of return: he had been born in southern Ecuador during one of his father’s
campaigns. He himself brought with him one of his teenage sons, Atawallpa. When
Wayna Qhapaq came to his birthplace, the city now called Cuenca, Cobo reported, “he
commanded that a magnificent palace be constructed for himself.” Wayna Qhapaq liked
his new quarters so much that he stayed on while Atawallpa and his generals went out to
subjugate a few more provinces.
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In 1615, the Inka writer Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala presented his life’s work,
a massive history of Inka society with four hundred drawings, to King Philip II of Spain,
hoping that the king would use it to learn more about his new subjects. Whether Philip
ever saw the manuscript is unknown, but Poma de Ayala’s work—one of the few
non-European accounts of Inka life—is now a fundamental scholarly source. Although
the portraits here are not taken from life, they hint at how the Inka viewed and
remembered their leaders.
They did not meet with success. The peoples of the wet equatorial forests did not
belong to the Andean culture system and were not interested in joining. They fought
ferociously. Caught by an ambush, Atawallpa was forced to retreat. Enraged by this
failure, Cobo wrote, Wayna Qhapaq “prepared himself as quickly as possible to go in
person and avenge this disgrace.” He left his pleasure palace and publicly berated
Atawallpa at the front. In a renewed offensive, the army advanced under the Inka’s
personal command. Bearing clubs, spears, bows, lances, slings, and copper axes, brilliant
in cloaks of feathers and silver breastplates, their faces painted in terrifying designs, the
Inka army plunged into the forests of the northern coast. They sang and shouted in unison
as they fought. The battle seesawed until a sudden counterattack knocked Wayna Qhapaq
out of his litter—a humiliation. Nearly captured by his foes, he was forced to walk like a
plebe back to his new palace. The Inka army regrouped and returned. After prolonged
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struggle it subjugated its foes.
Finding the warm Ecuadorian climate more to his liking than that of chilly Qosqo,
Wayna Qhapaq delayed his triumphal return for six years. Wearing soft, loose clothing of
vampire-bat wool, he swanned around his palaces with a bowl of palm wine or chicha, a
sweet, muddy, beer-like drink usually made from crushed maize. “When his captains and
chief Indians asked him how, though drinking so much, he never got intoxicated,”
reported Pizarro’s younger cousin and page, Pedro, “they say that he replied that he drank
for the poor, of whom he supported many.”
In 1525 Wayna Qhapaq suddenly got sick and expired in his Ecuadorian retreat.
Once again the succession was contested and bloody. Details are murky, but on his
deathbed the Inka seems to have passed over Atawallpa, who had not distinguished
himself, and designated as his heir a son named Ninan K’uychi. Unluckily, Ninan
K’uychi died of the same illness right before Wayna Qhapaq. The Inka’s next pick was a
nineteen-year-old son who had stayed behind in Qosqo. As was customary, high priests
subjected this choice to a divination. They learned that this son would be dreadfully
unlucky. The priest who reported this unhappy result to Wayna Qhapaq found him dead.
In consequence, the court nobles were left to choose the emperor. They settled on the
teenager who had been the Inka’s final choice.
The teenager’s principal qualification for the post was that his mother was Wayna
Qhapaq’s sister. Nonetheless, he had no doubts about crowning himself immediately—he
didn’t even wait to find out if Wayna Qhapaq had left any instructions or last wishes. The
new Inka took the name Washkar Inka (“Golden Chain Inka”). Atawallpa remained in
Ecuador, ostensibly because he was unable to show his face after being berated by his
father, but presumably also because he knew that the life expectancy of Inka brothers
tended to be short.
Meanwhile, Wayna Qhapaq’s mummified body was dressed in fine clothing and
taken back to Qosqo on a gold litter bedecked with feathers. Along the way, the dead
emperor’s executors, four high-ranking nobles, schemed to depose and murder Washkar
and install yet another son in his place. Something aroused Washkar’s suspicions as the
party neared Qosqo—perhaps his discovery that Atawallpa had stayed in Ecuador with
most of the Inka army, perhaps a tipoff from a loyal uncle whom the conspirators had
approached. After staging a grand funeral for his father, Washkar ordered the executors
to meet him one at a time, which provided the occasion to arrest them. Torture and
execution followed.
The plot circumvented, Washkar went to work eliminating any remaining
objections to his accession. Because Wayna Qhapaq had not actually married Washkar’s
mother—the union was properly incestuous but not properly legitimate—the new Inka
demanded that his mother participate ex post facto in a wedding ceremony with his
father’s mummy. Even for the Andes this was an unusual step. Washkar further solidified
his credentials as ruler by marrying his sister. According to the unsympathetic account of
Cabello Balboa, Washkar’s mother, who was apparently willing to marry her dead
brother, objected to her son’s plan to marry her daughter. The ceremony took place only
after “much begging and supplication.”
Civil war was probably unavoidable. Egged on by scheming courtiers and
generals, relations between Atawallpa and Washkar spent several years swinging through
the emotional valence from concealed suspicion to overt hostility. Washkar, in Qosqo,
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had the machinery of the state at his disposal; in addition, his claim to the fringe was
generally accepted. Atawallpa, in Ecuador, had a war-tested army and the best generals
but a weaker claim to the throne (his mother was merely his father’s cousin, not his
sister). The war lasted for more than three years, seesawed across the Andes, and was
spectacularly brutal. Washkar’s forces seized the initial advantage, invading Ecuador and
actually capturing Atawallpa, almost tearing off one of his ears in the process. In a
sequence reminiscent of Hollywood, one of Atawallpa’s wives supposedly smuggled a
crowbar-like tool into his improvised battlefield prison (his intoxicated guards permitted
a conjugal visit). Atawallpa dug his way out, escaped to Ecuador, reassembled his army,
and drove his foes south. On a plateau near today’s Peru-Ecuador border the northern
forces personally led by Atawallpa shattered Washkar’s army. A decade later Cieza de
León saw the battleground and from the wreckage and unburied remains thought the dead
could have numbered sixteen thousand. The victors captured and beheaded Washkar’s
main general. Atawallpa mounted a bowl atop the skull, inserted a spout between the
teeth, and used it as a cup for his chicha.
With the momentum of war turning against him, Washkar left Qosqo to lead his
own army. Atawallpa sent his forces ahead to meet it. After a horrific battle (Cieza de
León estimated the dead at thirty-five thousand), Washkar was captured in an ambush in
the summer of 1532. Atawallpa’s generals took the Inka as a captive to Qosqo and
executed his wives, children, and relatives in front of him. Meanwhile, Atawallpa’s
triumphant cavalcade, perhaps as many as eighty thousand strong, slowly promenaded to
Qosqo. In October or November 1532, the victors stopped outside the small city of
Cajamarca, where they learned that pale, hairy people who sat on enormous animals had
landed on the coast.
No matter how many times what happened next has been recounted, it has not lost
its power to shock: how the curious Atawallpa decided to wait for the strangers’ party to
arrive; how Pizarro, for it was he, persuaded Atawallpa to visit the Spaniards in the
central square of Cajamarca, which was surrounded on three sides by long, empty
buildings (the town apparently had been evacuated for the war); how on November 16,
1532, the emperor-to-be came to Cajamarca in his gilded and feather-decked litter,
preceded by a squadron of liveried men who swept the ground and followed by five or six
thousand troops, almost all of whom bore only ornamental, parade-type weapons; how
Pizarro hid his horses and cannons just within the buildings lining the town square, where
the 168 Spanish awaited the Inka with such fear, Pedro Pizarro noted, that many “made
water without knowing it out of sheer terror”; how a Spanish priest presented Atawallpa
with a travel-stained Christian breviary, which the Inka, to whom it literally meant
nothing, impatiently threw aside, providing the Spanish with a legal fig leaf for an attack
(desecrating Holy Writ); how the Spanish, firing cannons, wearing armor, and mounted
on horses, none of which the Indians had ever seen, suddenly charged into the square;
how the Indians were so panicked by the smoke and fire and steel and charging animals
that in trying to flee hundreds trampled each other to death (“they formed mounds and
suffocated one another,” one conquistador wrote); how the Spanish took advantage of the
soldiers’ lack of weaponry to kill almost all the rest; how the native troops who recovered
from their initial surprise desperately clustered around Atawallpa, supporting his litter
with their shoulders even after Spanish broadswords sliced off their hands; how Pizarro
personally dragged down the emperor-to-be and hustled him through the heaps of bodies
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on the square to what would become his prison.
Pizarro exulted less in victory than one might imagine. A self-made man, the
illiterate, illegitimate, neglected son of an army captain, he ached with dreams of wealth
and chivalric glory despite the fortune he had already acquired in the Spanish colonies.
After landing in Peru he realized that his tiny force was walking into the maw of a
powerful empire. Even after his stunning triumph in Cajamarca he remained torn between
fear and ambition. For his part, Atawallpa observed the power of Inka gold and silver to
cloud European minds.
*9 Precious metals were not valuable in the same way in
Tawantinsuyu, because there was no currency. To the Inka ruler, the foreigners’
fascination with gold apparently represented his best chance to manipulate the situation to
his advantage. He offered to fill a room twenty-two feet by seventeen feet full of gold
objects—and two equivalent rooms with silver—in exchange for his freedom. Pizarro
quickly agreed to the plan.
Atawallpa, still in command of the empire, ordered his generals to strip Qosqo of
its silver and gold. Not having lived in the city since childhood, he had little attachment
to it. He also told his men to slay Washkar, whom they still held captive; all of Washkar’s
main supporters; and, while they were at it, all of Atawallpa’s surviving brothers. After
his humiliating captivity ended, Atawallpa seems to have believed, the ground would be
clear for his rule.
Between December 1532 and May 1533, caravans of precious objects—jewelry,
fine sculptures, architectural ornamentation—wended on llama-back to Cajamarca. As
gold and silver slowly filled the rooms, all of Tawantinsuyu seemed frozen. It was as if
someone had slipped into the Kremlin in 1950 and held Stalin at gunpoint, leaving the
nation, accustomed to obeying a tyrant, utterly rudderless. Meanwhile, the waiting
Spanish, despite their unprecedented success, grew increasingly fearful and suspicious.
When Atawallpa fulfilled his half of the bargain and the ransom was complete Pizarro
melted everything into ingots and shipped them to Spain. The conquistadors did not
follow through on their part of the deal. Rather than releasing Atawallpa, they garroted
him. Then they marched to Qosqo.
Almost at a stroke, just 168 men had dealt a devastating blow to the greatest
empire on earth. To be sure, their victory was nowhere near complete: huge, bloody
battles still lay ahead. Even after the conquistadors seized Qosqo, the empire regrouped
in the hinterlands, where it fought off Spanish forces for another forty years. Yet the scale
of Pizarro’s triumph at Cajamarca cannot be gainsaid. He had routed a force fifty times
larger than his own, won the greatest ransom ever seen, and vanquished a cultural
tradition that had lasted five millennia—all without suffering a single casualty.
VIRGIN SOIL
I have just pulled a fast one. The Inka history above is as contemporary scholars
understand it. They disagree on which social factors to emphasize and on how much
weight to assign individual Spanish chronicles, but the outline seems not in serious
dispute. The same is not true of my rendering of Pizarro’s conquest. I presented what is
more or less the account current when Dobyns arrived in Peru. But in his reading he
discovered a hole in this version of events—a factor so critical that it drastically changed
Dobyns’s view of native America.
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Why did the Inka lose? The usual answer is that Pizarro had two advantages: steel
(swords and armor, rifles and cannons) and horses. The Indians had no steel weapons and
no animals to ride (llamas are too small to carry grown men). They also lacked the wheel
and the arch. With such inferior technology, Tawantinsuyu had no chance. “What could
[the Inka] offer against this armory?” asked John Hemming, the conquest historian.
“They were still fighting in the bronze age.” The Inka kept fighting after Atawallpa’s
death. But even though they outnumbered the Europeans by as much as a hundred to one,
they always lost. “No amount of heroism or discipline by an Inka army,” Hemming
wrote, “could match the military superiority of the Spaniards.”
But just as guns did not determine the outcome of conflict in New England, steel
was not the decisive factor in Peru. True, anthropologists have long marveled that
Andean societies did not make steel. Iron is plentiful in the mountains, yet the Inka used
metal for almost nothing useful. In the late 1960s, Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist at
the MIT Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology, suggested to “an
eminent scholar of Andean prehistory that we take a serious and careful look at Andean
metallurgy.” He responded, “But there wasn’t any.” Lechtman went and looked anyway.
She discovered that Inka metallurgy was, in fact, as refined as European metallurgy, but
that it had such different goals that academic experts had not even recognized it.
According to Lechtman, Europeans sought to optimize metals’ “hardness,
strength, toughness, and sharpness.” The Inka, by contrast, valued “plasticity,
malleability, and toughness.” Europeans used metal for tools. Andean societies primarily
used it as a token of wealth, power, and community affiliation. European metalworkers
tended to create metal objects by pouring molten alloys into shaped molds. Such
foundries were not unknown to the Inka, but Andean societies vastly preferred to hammer
metal into thin sheets, form the sheets around molds, and solder the results. The results
were remarkable by any standard—one delicate bust that Lechtman analyzed was less
than an inch tall but made of twenty-two separate gold plates painstakingly joined.
If a piece of jewelry or a building ornament was to proclaim its owner’s status, as
the Inka desired, it needed to shine. Luminous gold and silver were thus preferable to dull
iron. Because pure gold and silver are too soft to hold their shape, Andean metalworkers
mixed them with other metals, usually copper. This strengthened the metal but turned it
an ugly pinkish-copper color. To create a lustrous gold surface, Inka smiths heated the
copper-gold alloy, which increases the rate at which the copper atoms on the surface
combine with oxygen atoms in the air—it makes the metal corrode faster. Then they
pounded the hot metal with mallets, making the corrosion flake off the outside. By
repeating this process many times, they removed the copper atoms from the surface of the
metal, creating a veneer of almost pure gold. Ultimately the Inka ended up with strong
sheets of metal that glittered in the sun.
Andean cultures did make tools, of course. But rather than making them out of
steel, they preferred fiber. The choice is less odd than it may seem. Mechanical
engineering depends on two main forces: compression and tension. Both are employed in
European technology, but the former is more common—the arch is a classic example of
compression. By contrast, tension was the Inka way. “Textiles are held together by
tension,” William Conklin, a research associate at the Textile Museum in Washington,
D.C., told me. “And they exploited that tension with amazing inventiveness and
precision.”
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In the technosphere of the Andes, Lechtman explained, “people solved basic
engineering problems through the manipulation of fibers,” not by creating and joining
hard wooden or metal objects. To make boats, Andean cultures wove together reeds
rather than cutting up trees into planks and nailing them together. Although smaller than
big European ships, these vessels were not puddle-muddlers; Europeans first encountered
Tawantinsuyu in the form of an Inka ship sailing near the equator, three hundred miles
from its home port, under a load of fine cotton sails. It had a crew of twenty and was
easily the size of a Spanish caravelle. Famously, the Inka used foot-thick cables to make
suspension bridges across mountain gorges. Because Europe had no bridges without
supports below, they initially terrified Pizarro’s men. Later one conquistador reassured
his countrymen that they could walk across these Inka inventions “without endangering
themselves.”
Andean textiles were woven with great precision—elite garments could have a
thread count of five hundred per inch—and structured in elaborate layers. Soldiers wore
armor made from sculpted, quilted cloth that was almost as effective at shielding the
body as European armor and much lighter. After trying it, the conquistadors ditched their
steel breastplates and helmets wholesale and dressed like Inka infantry when they fought.
Although Andean troops carried bows, javelins, maces, and clubs, their most
fearsome weapon, the sling, was made of cloth. A sling is a woven pouch attached to two
strings. The slinger puts a stone or slug in the pouch, picks up the strings by the free ends,
spins them around a few times, and releases one of the strings at the proper moment.
Expert users could hurl a stone, the Spanish adventurer Alonso Enríquez de Guzmán
wrote, “with such force that it will kill a horse…. I have seen a stone, thus hurled from a
sling, break a swordin two pieces when it was held in a man’s hand at a distance of thirty
paces.” (Experimenting with a five-foot-long, Andean-style sling and an egg-sized rock
from my garden, I was able, according to my rough calculation, to throw the stone at
more than one hundred miles per hour. My aim was terrible, though.)
In a frightening innovation, the Inka heated stones in campfires until they were
red hot, wrapped them in pitch-soaked cotton, and hurled them at their targets. The cotton
caught fire in midair. In a sudden onslaught the sky would rain burning missiles. During a
counterattack in May 1536 an Inka army used these missiles to burn Spanish-occupied
Qosqo to the ground. Unable to step outside, the conquistadors cowered in shelters
beneath a relentless, weeks-long barrage of flaming stone. Rather than evacuate, the
Spanish, as brave as they were greedy, fought to the end. In a desperate, last-ditch
counterattack, the Europeans eked out victory.
More critical than steel to Pizarro’s success was the horse. The biggest animal in
the Andes during Inka times was the llama, which typically weighs three hundred
pounds. Horses, four times as massive, were profoundly, terribly novel. Add to this the
shock of observing humans somehow astride their backs like half-bestial nightmare
figures and it is possible to imagine the dismay provoked by Pizarro’s cavalry. Not only
did Inka infantrymen have to overcome their initial stupefaction, their leaders had to
reinvent their military tactics while in the midst of an invasion. Mounted troops were able
to move at rates never encountered in Tawantinsuyu. “Even when the Indians had posted
pickets,” Hemming observed, “the Spanish cavalry could ride past them faster than the
sentries could run back to warn of danger.” In clash after clash, “the dreaded horses
proved invincible.” But horses are not inherently unbeatable; the Inka simply did not
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discover quickly enough where they had an advantage: on their roads.
The conquistadors disparaged steep Inka highways because they had been
designed for sure-footed llamas rather than horses. But they were beautifully made—this
road, photographed in the 1990 s, had lasted more than five hundred years without
maintenance.
European-style roads, constructed with horses and cars in mind, view flatness as a
virtue; to go up a steep hill, they use switchbacks to make the route as horizontal as
possible. Inka roads, by contrast, were built for llamas. Llamas prefer the coolness of
high altitudes and, unlike horses, readily go up and down steps. As a result, Inka roads
eschewed valley bottoms and used long stone stairways to climb up steep hills
directly—brutal on horses’ hooves, as the conquistadors often complained. Traversing the
foothills to Cajamarca, Francisco Pizarro’s younger brother Hernando lamented that the
route, a perfectly good Inka highway, was “so bad” that the Spanish “could not use
horses on the roads, not even with skill.” Instead the conquistadors had to dismount and
lead their reluctant animals through the steps. At that point they were vulnerable. Late in
the day, Inka soldiers learned to wait above and roll boulders on their foes, killing some
of the animals and frightening others into running away. Men left behind could be picked
off at leisure. Multiple ambushes cost the lives of many Spanish troops and animals.
To be sure, horses confer an advantage on flat ground. But even on the plains the
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Inka could have won. Foot soldiers have often drubbed mounted troops. At the battle of
Marathon in 490 B.C., the outnumbered, outarmored Athenian infantry destroyed the
cavalry of the Persian emperor Darius I. More than six thousand Persians died; the
Greeks lost fewer than two hundred men. So dire had the situation initially appeared that
before the fight Athens sent a messenger to Sparta, its hated rival, to beg for aid. In the
original marathon, the courier ran more than a hundred miles in two days to deliver his
message. But by the time the Spartan reinforcements arrived, there was nothing to see but
dead Persians.
The Inka losses were not foreordained. Their military was hampered by the cult of
personality around its deified generals, which meant both that leaders were not easily
replaced when they were killed or captured and that innovation in the lower ranks was
not encouraged. And the army never learned to bunch its troops into tight formations, as
the Greeks did at Marathon, forming human masses that can literally stand up to cavalry.
Nonetheless, by the time of the siege of Qosqo the Inka had developed an effective
anti-cavalry tactic: bolas. The Inka bola consisted of three stones tied to lengths of llama
tendon. Soldiers threw them, stones a-whirl, at charging horses. The weapons wrapped
themselves around the animals’ legs and brought them down to be killed by volleys of
sling missiles. Had the bolas come in massed, coordinated onslaughts instead of being
wielded by individual soldiers as they thought opportune, Pizarro might well have met his
match.
If not technology or the horse, what defeated the Inka? As I said, some of the
blame should be heaped on the overly centralized Inka command structure, a problem
that has plagued armies throughout time. But another, much larger part of the answer was
first stated firmly by Henry Dobyns. During his extracurricular reading about Peru, he
came across a passage by Pedro Cieza de León, the Spanish traveler who observed three
roads between the same two cities. Entranced by the first exhibition of Inka booty in
Spain, Cieza de León had crossed the Atlantic as a teenager and spent fifteen years in
Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, traveling, fighting, and taking notes for what
would become a massive, three-volume survey of the region. Only the first part was
printed in his lifetime, but by the twentieth century historians had found and published
most of the rest. Dobyns learned something from Cieza de León that was not mentioned
in Prescott’s history, in the Smithsonian’s official Handbook of South American Indians,
or in any of the then-standard descriptions of Tawantinsuyu. According to Cieza de León,
Wayna Qhapaq, Atawallpa’s father, died when “a great plague of smallpox broke out [in
1524 or 1525], so severe that more than 200,000 died of it, for it spread to all parts of the
kingdom.”
Smallpox not only killed Wayna Qhapaq, it killed his son and designated
heir—and his brother, uncle, and sister-wife. The main generals and much of the officer
corps died, wrote the Inka chronicler Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, “all
their faces covered with scabs.” So did the two regents left in Qosqo by Wayna Qhapaq
to administer the empire. After the dying Wayna Qhapaq locked himself away so that
nobody could see his pustulous face, Salcamayhua reported, he was visited by a terrifying
midnight vision. Surrounding him in his dream were “millions upon millions of men.”
The Inka asked who they were. “Souls of the lost,” the multitude told him. All of them
“would die from the pestilence,” each and every one.
The story is probably apocryphal, but its import isn’t. Smallpox has an incubation
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period of about twelve days, during which time sufferers, who may not know they are
sick, can infect anyone they meet. With its fine roads and great population movements,
Tawantinsuyu was perfectly positioned for a major epidemic. Smallpox radiated
throughout the empire like ink spreading through tissue paper. Millions of people
simultaneously experienced its symptoms: high fever, vomiting, severe pain, oozing
blisters everywhere on the body. Unable to number the losses, the Jesuit Martín de Murúa
said only that the toll was “infinite thousands.”
The smallpox virus is thought to have evolved from a cattle virus that causes
cowpox; a now-extinct equine virus responsible for horsepox; or, perhaps most likely, the
camelpox virus, which affects camels, as the name suggests. People who survive the
disease become immune to it. In Europe, the virus was such a constant presence that most
adults were immune. Because the Western Hemisphere had no cows, horses, or camels,
smallpox had no chance to evolve there. Indians had never been exposed to it—they were
“virgin soil,” in epidemiological jargon.
Virgin-soil death rates for smallpox are hard to establish because for the last
century most potential research subjects have been vaccinated. But a study in the early
1960s of seven thousand unvaccinated smallpox cases in southern India found that the
disease killed 43 percent of its victims. Noting the extreme vulnerability of Andean
populations—they would not even have known to quarantine victims, as Europeans
had—Dobyns hypothesized that the empire’s population “may well have been halved
during this epidemic.” In about three years, that is, as many as one out of two people in
Tawantinsuyu died.
The human and social costs are beyond measure. Such overwhelming traumas tear
at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that struck Athens in 430 B.C.,
Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.” The people
“became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic
cults and allowed sick refugees to desecrate the great temples, where they died untended.
A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations. Martin Luther’s
rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the plague, as was modern anti-Semitism.
Landowners’ fields were emptied by death, forcing them either to work peasants harder
or pay more to attract new labor. Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France,
1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the
Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in the German states. Is it
necessary to spell out that societies mired in fratricidal chaos are vulnerable to conquest?
To borrow a trope from the historian Alfred Crosby, if Genghis Khan had arrived with
the Black Death, this book would not be written in a European language.
As for Tawantinsuyu, smallpox wiped out Wayna Qhapaq and his court, which
led to civil war as the survivors contested the spoils. The soldiers who died in the battle
between Atawallpa and Washkar were as much victims of smallpox as those who died
from the virus itself.
The ferocity of the civil war was exacerbated by the epidemic’s impact on a
peculiarly Andean institution: royal mummies. People in Andean societies viewed
themselves as belonging to family lineages. (Europeans did, too, but lineages were more
important in the Andes; the pop-cultural comparison might be The Lord of the Rings, in
which characters introduce themselves as “X, son of Y” or “A, of B’s line.”) Royal
lineages, called panaqa, were special. Each new emperor was born in one panaqa but
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created a new one when he took the fringe. To the new panaqa belonged the Inka and his
wives and children, along with his retainers and advisers. When the Inka died his panaqa
mummified his body. Because the Inka was believed to be an immortal deity, his mummy
was treated, logically enough, as if it were still living. Soon after arriving in Qosqo,
Pizarro’s companion Miguel de Estete saw a parade of defunct emperors. They were
brought out on litters, “seated on their thrones and surrounded by pages and women with
flywhisks in their hands, who ministered to them with as much respect as if they had been
alive.”
Because the royal mummies were not considered dead, their successors obviously
could not inherit their wealth. Each Inka’s panaqa retained all of his possessions forever,
including his palaces, residences, and shrines; all of his remaining clothes, eating utensils,
fingernail parings, and hair clippings; and the tribute from the land he had conquered. In
consequence, as Pedro Pizarro realized, “the greater part of the people, treasure,
expenses, and vices [in Tawantinsuyu] were under the control of the dead.” The
mummies spoke through female mediums who represented the panaqa’s surviving
courtiers or their descendants. With almost a dozen immortal emperors jostling for
position, high-level Inka society was characterized by ramose political intrigue of a scale
that would have delighted the Medici. Emblematically, Wayna Qhapaq could not
construct his own villa on Awkaypata—his undead ancestors had used up all the
available space. Inka society had a serious mummy problem.
After smallpox wiped out much of the political elite, each panaqa tried to move
into the vacuum, stoking the passions of the civil war. Different mummies at different
times backed different claimants to the Inka throne. After Atawallpa’s victory, his
panaqa took the mummy of Thupa Inka from its palace and burned it outside
Qosqo—burned it alive, so to speak. And later Atawallpa instructed his men to seize the
gold for his ransom as much as possible from the possessions of another enemy panaqa,
that of Pachacuti’s mummy.
Washkar’s panaqa kept the civil war going even after his death (or, rather,
nondeath). While Atawallpa was imprisoned, Washkar’s panaqa sent one of his younger
brothers, Thupa Wallpa, to Cajamarca. In a surreptitious meeting with Pizarro, Thupa
Wallpa proclaimed that he was Washkar’s legitimate heir. Pizarro hid him in his own
quarters. Soon afterward, the lord of Cajamarca, who had backed Washkar in the civil
war, told the Spanish that Atawallpa’s army was on the move, tens of thousands strong.
Its generals planned to attack Pizarro, he said, and free the emperor. Atawallpa denied the
charge, truthfully. Pizarro nonetheless ordered him to be bound. Some of the Spaniards
most sympathetic to Atawallpa asked to investigate. Soon after they left, two Inka ran to
Pizarro, claiming that they had just fled from the invading army. Pizarro hurriedly
convoked a military tribunal, which quickly sentenced the Inka to execution—the theory
apparently being that the approaching army would not attack if its leader were dead. Too
late the Spanish expedition came back to report that no Inka army was on the move.
Thupa Wallpa emerged from hiding and was awarded the fringe as the new Inka.
The execution, according to John Rowe, the Berkeley archaeologist, was the
result of a conspiracy among Pizarro, Thupa Wallpa, and the lord of Cajamarca. By
ridding himself of Atawallpa and taking on Thupa Wallpa, Rowe argued, Pizarro “had
exchanged an unwilling hostage for a friend and ally.” In fact, Thupa Wallpa openly
swore allegiance to Spain. To him, the oath was a small price to pay; by siding with
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Pizarro, Washkar’s panaqa, “which had lost everything, had a chance again.” Apparently
the new Inka hoped to return with Pizarro to Qosqo, where he might be able to seize the
wheel of state. After that, perhaps, he could wipe out the Spaniards.
Although Andean societies have been buffeted by disease and economic
exploitation since the arrival of Europeans, indigenous tradition remained strong enough
that this chicha seller in Cuzco, photographed by Martín Chambi in 1921, might have
seemed unremarkable in the days of the Inka.
On the way to Qosqo, Pizarro met his first important resistance near the river
town of Hatun Xauxa, which had been overrun by Atawallpa’s army during the civil war.
The same force had returned there to battle the Spanish. But the Inka army’s plan to burn
down the town and prevent the invaders from crossing the river was foiled by the native
Xauxa and Wanka populace, which had long resented the empire. Not only did they fight
the Inka, they followed the old adage about the enemy of my enemy being my friend and
actually furnished supplies to Pizarro.
After the battle Thupa Wallpa suddenly died—so suddenly that many Spaniards
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elieved he had been poisoned. The leading suspect was Challcochima, one of
Atawallpa’s generals, whom Pizarro had captured at Cajamarca and brought along on his
expedition to Qosqo. Challcochima may not have murdered Thupa Wallpa, but he
certainly used the death to try to persuade Pizarro that the next Inka should be one of
Atawallpa’s sons, not anyone associated with Washkar. Meanwhile, Washkar’s panaqa
sent out yet another brother, Manqo Inka. He promised that if he were chosen to succeed
Thupa Wallpa he would swear the same oath of allegiance to Spain. In return, he asked
Pizarro to kill Challcochima. Pizarro agreed and the Spaniards publicly burned
Challcochima to death in the main plaza of the next town they came to. Then they rode
toward Qosqo.
To Dobyns, the moral of this story was clear. The Inka, he wrote in his 1963
article, were not defeated by steel and horses but by disease and factionalism. In this he
was echoing conclusions drawn centuries before by Pedro Pizarro. Had Wayna Qhapaq
“been alive when we Spaniards entered this land,” the conquistador remarked, “it would
have been impossible for us to win it…. And likewise, had the land not been divided by
the [smallpox-induced civil] wars, we would not have been able to enter or win the land.”
Pizarro’s words, Dobyns realized, applied beyond Tawantinsuyu. He had studied
demographic records in both Peru and southern Arizona. In both, as in New England,
epidemic disease arrived before the first successful colonists. When the Europeans
actually arrived, the battered, fragmented cultures could not unite to resist the incursion.
Instead one party, believing that it was about to lose the struggle for dominance, allied
with the invaders to improve its position. The alliance was often successful, in that the
party gained the desired advantage. But its success was usually temporary and the culture
as a whole always lost.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this pattern occurred again and
again in the Americas. It was a kind of master narrative of postcontact history. In fact,
Europeans routinely lost when they could not take advantage of disease and political
fragmentation. Conquistadors tried to take Florida half a dozen times between 1510 and
1560—and failed each time. In 1532 King João III of Portugal divided the coast of Brazil
into fourteen provinces and dispatched colonists to each one. By 1550 only two
settlements survived. The French were barely able to sustain trading posts in the St.
Lawrence and didn’t even try to plant their flag in pre-epidemic New England. European
microorganisms were slow to penetrate the Yucatán Peninsula, where most of the Maya
polities were too small to readily play off against each other. In consequence, Spain never
fully subdued the Maya. The Zapatista rebellion that convulsed southern Mexico in the
1990s was merely the most recent battle in an episodic colonial war that began in the
sixteenth century.
All of this was important, the stuff of historians’ arguments and doctoral
dissertations, but Dobyns was thinking of something else. If Pizarro had been amazed by
the size of Tawantinsuyu after the terrible epidemic and war, how many people had been
living there to begin with? Beyond that, what was the population of the Western
Hemisphere in 1491?
AN ARITHMETICAL PROGRESSION
Wayna Qhapaq died in the first smallpox epidemic. The virus struck
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Tawantinsuyu again in 1533, 1535, 1558, and 1565. Each time the consequences were
beyond the imagination of our fortunate age. “They died by scores and hundreds,”
recalled one eyewitness to the 1565 outbreak. “Villages were depopulated. Corpses were
scattered over the fields or piled up in the houses or huts…. The fields were uncultivated;
the herds were untended [and] the price of food rose to such an extent that many persons
found it beyond their reach. They escaped the foul disease, but only to be wasted by
famine.” In addition, Tawantinsuyu was invaded by other European pestilences, to which
the Indians were equally susceptible. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza in 1558
(together with smallpox), diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618—all flensed the remains of
Inka culture. Taken as a whole, Dobyns thought, the epidemics must have killed nine out
of ten of the inhabitants of Tawantinsuyu.
Dobyns was not the first to arrive at this horrific conclusion. But he was the first
to put it together with the fact that smallpox visited before anyone in South America had
even seen Europeans. The most likely source of the virus, Dobyns realized, was the
Caribbean. Smallpox was recorded to have appeared on the island of Hispaniola in
November or December 1518. It killed a third of the native population before jumping to
Puerto Rico and Cuba. Spaniards, exposed in childhood to the virus, were mostly
immune. During Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, an expedition led by Pánfilo de
Narváez landed on April 23, 1520, near what is today the city of Veracruz. According to
several Spanish accounts, the force included an African slave named Francisco Eguía or
Baguía who had smallpox. Other reports say that the carriers were Cuban Indians whom
Narváez had brought as auxiliaries. In any case, someone brought the virus—and infected
a hemisphere.
The disease raced to Tenochtitlan, leading city of the Mexica (Aztecs), where it
laid waste to the metropolis and then the rest of the empire. From there, Dobyns
discovered, colonial accounts show smallpox hopscotching through Central America to
Panama. At that point it was only a few hundred miles from the Inka frontier. The virus
seemingly crossed the gap, with catastrophic consequences.
Then Dobyns went further. When microbes arrived in the Western Hemisphere,
he argued, they must have swept from the coastlines first visited by Europeans to inland
areas populated by Indians who had never seen a white person. Colonial writers knew
that disease tilled the virgin soil of the Americas countless times in the sixteenth century.
But what they did not, could not, know is that the epidemics shot out like ghastly arrows
from the limited areas they saw to every corner of the hemisphere, wreaking destruction
in places that never appeared in the European historical record. The first whites to
explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have encountered places that were
already depopulated.
As a result, Dobyns said, all colonial population estimates were too low. Many of
them, put together just after epidemics, would have represented population nadirs, not
approximations of precontact numbers. From a few incidents in which before and after
totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns calculated that in the first 130 years of
contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died. To estimate native numbers
before Columbus, one thus had to multiply census figures from those times by a factor of
twenty or more. The results obtained by this procedure were, by historical standards,
stunningly high.
Historians had long wondered how many Indians lived in the Americas before
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contact. “Debated since Columbus attempted a partial census at Hispaniola in 1496,”
Denevan, the Beni geographer, has written, “it remains one of the great inquiries of
history.” Early researchers’ figures were, to put it mildly, informally ascertained. “Most
of them weren’t even ballpark calculations,” Denevan told me. “No ballpark was
involved.” Only in 1928 did the first careful estimate of the indigenous population
appear. James Mooney, a distinguished ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution,
combed through colonial writings and government documents to conclude that in 1491
North America had 1.15 million inhabitants. Alfred L. Kroeber, the renowned Berkeley
anthropologist, built upon Mooney’s work in the 1930s. Kroeber cut back the tally still
further, to 900,000—a population density of less than one person for every six square
miles. Just 8.4 million Indians, Kroeber suggested, had lived in the entire hemisphere.
Recognizing that his continent-wide estimate did not account for regional
variation, Kroeber encouraged future scholars to seek out and analyze “sharply localized
documentary evidence.” As he knew, some of his Berkeley colleagues were already
making those analyses. Geographer Carl Sauer published the first modern estimate of
northwest Mexico’s pre-Columbian population in 1935. Meanwhile, physiologist
Sherburne F. Cook investigated the consequences of disease in the same area. Cook
joined forces with Woodrow W. Borah, a Berkeley historian, in the mid-1950s. In a series
of publications that stretched to the 1970s, the two men combed through colonial
financial, census, and land records. Their results made Kroeber uneasy. When Columbus
landed, Cook and Borah concluded, the central Mexican plateau alone had a population
of 25.2 million. By contrast, Spain and Portugal together had fewer than ten million
inhabitants. Central Mexico, they said, was the most densely populated place on earth,
with more than twice as many people per square mile than China or India.
“Historians and anthropologists did not, however, seem to be paying much
attention” to Cook and Borah, Dobyns wrote. Years later, his work, coupled with that of
Denevan, Crosby, and William H. McNeill, finally made them take notice. Based on their
work and his own, Dobyns argued that the Indian population in 1491 was between 90 and
112 million people. Another way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more
people lived in the Americas than in Europe.
According to a 1999 estimate from the United Nations, the earth’s population in
the beginning of the sixteenth century was about 500 million. If Dobyns was right,
disease claimed the lives of 80 to 100 million Indians by the first third of the seventeenth
century. All these numbers are at best rough approximations, but their implications are
clear: the epidemics killed about one out of every five people on earth. According to W.
George Lovell, a geographer at Queen’s University in Ontario, it was “the greatest
destruction of lives in human history.”
Dobyns published his conclusions in the journal Current Anthropology in 1966.
They spawned rebuttals, conferences, even entire books. (Denevan assembled one: The
Native Population of the Americas in 1492.) “I always felt guilty about the impact of my
Current Anthropology article,” Dobyns told me, “because I thought and still think that
Cook and Borah and Sauer had all said this in print earlier, but people weren’t listening.
I’m still puzzled by the reaction, to tell you the truth. Maybe it was the time—people
were prepared to listen in the 1960s.”
Listen—and attack. Dobyns’s population projections were quickly seen by some
as politically motivated—self-flagellation by guilty white liberals or, worse, a push to
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inflate the toll of imperialism from the hate-America crowd. “No question about it, some
people want those higher numbers,” Shepard Krech III, an anthropologist at Brown, told
me. These people, he said, were thrilled when Dobyns revisited the subject in a 1983
book, Their Number Become Thinned, and revised his estimates upward.
Most researchers thought Dobyns’s estimates too high but few critics were as
vehement as David Henige, of the University of Wisconsin, whose book, Numbers from
Nowhere, published in 1998, is a landmark in the literature of demographic vilification.
“Suspect in 1966, it is no less suspect nowadays,” Henige charged of Dobyns’s work. “If
anything, it is worse.” Henige stumbled across a seminar on Indian demography taught
by Denevan in 1976. An “epiphanic moment” occurred when he read that Cook and
Borah had “uncovered” the existence of eight million people in Hispaniola. Can you just
invent millions of people? he wondered. “We can make of the historical record that there
was depopulation and movement of people from internecine warfare and diseases,” he
said to me. “But as for how much, who knows? When we start putting numbers to
something like that—applying large figures like 95 percent—we’re saying things we
shouldn’t say. The number implies a level of knowledge that’s impossible.”
Indian activists reject this logic. “You always hear white people trying to
minimize the size of the aboriginal populations their ancestors personally displaced,”
according to Lenore Stiffarm, an ethnologist at the University of Saskatchewan.
Dismissing the impact of disease, in her view, is simply a way to reduce the original
population of the Americas. “Oh, there used to be a few people there, and disease killed
some of them, so by the time we got here they were almost all gone.” The smaller the
numbers of Indians, she said, the easier it is to regard the continent as empty, and hence
up for grabs. “It’s perfectly acceptable to move into unoccupied land,” Stiffarm told me.
“And land with only a few ‘savages’ is the next best thing.”
When Henige wrote Numbers from Nowhere, the fight about pre-Columbian
population had already consumed forests’ worth of trees—his bibliography is ninety
pages long. Four decades after Dobyns’s article appeared, his colleagues “are still
struggling to get out of the crater that paper left in anthropology,” according to James
Wilson, author of Their Earth Shall Weep, a history of North America’s indigenous
peoples after conquest. The dispute shows no sign of abating. This is partly because of
the inherent fascination with the subject. But it is also due to the growing realization of
how much is at stake.
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Frequently Asked Questions
NOT ENOUGH FOR YANKEE STADIUM
On May 30, 1539, Hernando De Soto landed his private army near Tampa Bay in
Florida. De Soto was a novel figure: half warrior, half venture capitalist. He grew very
rich very young in Spanish America by becoming a market leader in the nascent slave
trade. The profits helped to fund the conquest of the Inka, which made De Soto wealthier
still. He accompanied Pizarro to Tawantinsuyu, burnishing his reputation for
brutality—he personally tortured Challcochima, Atawallpa’s chief general, before his
execution. Literally looking for new worlds to conquer, De Soto returned to Spain soon
after his exploits in Peru. In Charles V’s court he persuaded the bored monarch to let him
loose in North America with an expedition of his own. He sailed to Florida with six
hundred soldiers, two hundred horses, and three hundred pigs.
From today’s perspective, it is difficult to imagine the ethical system that could
justify De Soto’s subsequent actions. For four years his force wandered through what are
now Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi,
Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, looking for gold and wrecking most everything it
touched. The inhabitants often fought back vigorously, but they were baffled by the
Spaniards’ motives and astounded by the sight and sound of horses and guns. De Soto
died of fever with his expedition in ruins. Along the way, though, he managed to rape,
torture, enslave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst thing he did, some researchers
say, was entirely without malice—he brought pigs.
According to Charles Hudson, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia who
spent fifteen years reconstructing De Soto’s path, the expedition built barges and crossed
the Mississippi a few miles downstream from the present site of Memphis. It was a
nervous time: every afternoon, one of the force later recalled, several thousand Indian
soldiers approached in canoes to within “a stone’s throw” of the Spanish and mocked
them as they labored. The Indians, “painted with ochre,” wore “plumes of many colors,
having feathered shields in their hands, with which they sheltered the oarsmen on either
side, the warriors standing erect from bow to stern, holding bows and arrows.” Utterly
without fear, De Soto ignored the taunts and occasional volleys of arrows and poled over
the river into what is now eastern Arkansas, a land “thickly set with great towns,”
according to the account, “two or three of them to be seen from one.” Each city protected
itself with earthen walls, sizable moats, and deadeye archers. In his brazen fashion, De
Soto marched right in, demanded food, and marched out.
After De Soto left, no Europeans visited this part of the Mississippi Valley for
more than a century. Early in 1682 white people appeared again, this time Frenchmen in
canoes. In one seat was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. La Salle passed through
the area where De Soto had found cities cheek by jowl. It was deserted—the French
didn’t see an Indian village for two hundred miles. About fifty settlements existed in this
strip of the Mississippi when De Soto showed up, according to Anne Ramenofsky, an
archaeologist at the University of New Mexico. By La Salle’s time the number had
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shrunk to perhaps ten, some probably inhabited by recent immigrants. De Soto “had a
privileged glimpse” of an Indian world, Hudson told me. “The window opened and
slammed shut. When the French came in and the record opened up again, it was a
transformed reality. A civilization crumbled. The question is, how did this happen?”
Today most historians and anthropologists believe the culprit was disease. In the
view of Ramenofsky and Patricia Galloway, an anthropologist at the University of Texas,
the source of contagion was very likely not De Soto’s army but its ambulatory meat
locker: his three hundred pigs. De Soto’s company was too small to be an effective
biological weapon. Sicknesses like measles and smallpox would have burned through his
six hundred men long before they reached the Mississippi. But that would not have been
true for his pigs.
Pigs were as essential to the conquistadors as horses. Spanish armies traveled in a
porcine cloud; drawn by the supper trough, the lean, hungry animals circled the troops
like darting dogs. Neither species regarded the arrangement as novel; they had lived
together in Europe for millennia. When humans and domesticated animals share quarters,
they are constantly exposed to each other’s microbes. Over time mutation lets animal
diseases jump to people: avian influenza becomes human influenza, bovine rinderpest
becomes human measles, horsepox becomes human smallpox. Unlike Europeans, Indians
did not live in constant contact with many animals. They domesticated only the dog; the
turkey (in Mesoamerica); and the llama, the alpaca, the Muscovy duck, and the guinea
pig (in the Andes). In some ways this is not surprising: the New World had fewer animal
candidates for taming than the Old. Moreover, few Indians carry the gene that permits
adults to digest lactose, a form of sugar abundant in milk. Non-milk drinkers, one
imagines, would be less likely to work at domesticating milk-giving animals. But this is
guesswork. The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the
Americas. By contrast, swine, mainstays of European agriculture, transmit anthrax,
brucellosis, leptospirosis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can
pass diseases to deer and turkeys, which then can infect people. Only a few of De Soto’s
pigs would have had to wander off to contaminate the forest.
The calamity wreaked by the De Soto expedition, Ramenofsky and Galloway
argued, extended across the whole Southeast. The societies of the Caddo, on the
Texas-Arkansas border, and the Coosa, in western Georgia, both disintegrated soon after.
The Caddo had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms,
mausoleums. After De Soto’s army left the Caddo stopped erecting community centers
and began digging community cemeteries. Between the visits of De Soto and La Salle,
according to Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the
Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent.
In the eighteenth century, the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today
would reduce the population of New York City to 56,000, not enough to fill Yankee
Stadium. “That’s one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,” Russell
Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said to me.
“Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was wiped out.”
Could a few pigs truly wreak this much destruction? Such apocalyptic scenarios
have invited skepticism since Henry Dobyns first drew them to wide attention. After all,
no eyewitness accounts exist of the devastation—none of the peoples in the Southeast
had any form of writing known today. Spanish and French narratives cannot be taken at
81

face value, and in any case say nothing substantial about disease. (The belief that
epidemics swept through the Southeast comes less from European accounts of the region
than from the disparities among those accounts.) Although the archaeological record is
suggestive, it is also frustratingly incomplete; soon after the Spaniards visited, mass
graves became more common in the Southeast, but there is yet no solid proof that a single
Indian in them died of a pig-transmitted disease. Asserting that De Soto’s visit caused the
subsequent collapse of the Caddo and Coosa may be only the old logical fallacy of post
hoc ergo propter hoc.
Not only do archaeologists like Dobyns, Perttula, and Ramenofsky argue that
unrecorded pandemics swept through the Americas, they claim that the diseases
themselves were of unprecedented deadliness. As a rule, viruses, microbes, and parasites
do not kill the majority of their victims—the pest that wipes out its host species has a
bleak evolutionary future. The influenza epidemic of 1918, until AIDS the greatest
epidemic of modern times, infected tens of millions around the world but killed fewer
than 5 percent of its victims. Even the Black Death, a symbol of virulence, was not as
deadly as these epidemics are claimed to be. The first European incursion of the Black
Death, in 1347–51, was a classic virgin-soil epidemic; mutation had just created the
pulmonary version of the bacillus Yersinia pestis. But even then the disease killed
perhaps a third of its victims. The Indians in De Soto’s path, if researchers are correct,
endured losses that were anomalously greater. How could this be true? the skeptics ask.
Consider, too, the Dobynsesque procedure for recovering original population
numbers: applying an assumed death rate, usually 95 percent, to the observed population
nadir. According to Douglas H. Ubelaker, an anthropologist at the National Museum of
Natural History, the population nadir for Indians north of the Río Grande was around
1900, when their numbers fell to about half a million. Assuming a 95 percent death rate
(which Ubelaker, a skeptic, does not), the precontact population of North America would
have been 10 million. Go up 1 percent to a 96 percent death rate and the figure jumps to
12.5 million—creating more than two million people arithmetically from a tiny increase
in mortality rates. At 98 percent, the number bounds to 25 million. Minute changes in
baseline assumptions produce wildly different results.
Worse, the figures have enormous margins of error. Rudolph Zambardino, a
statistician at North Staffordshire Polytechnic, in England, has pointed out that the lack of
direct data forces researchers into salvos of extrapolation. To approximate the population
of sixteenth-century Mexico, for example, historians have only the official counts of
casados (householders) in certain areas. To calculate the total population, they must
adjust that number by the estimated average number of people in each home, the
estimated number of homes not headed by a casado (and thus not counted), the estimated
number of casados missed by the census takers, and so on. Each one of these factors has
a margin of error. Unfortunately, as Zambardino noted, “the errors multiply each other
and can escalate rapidly to an unacceptable magnitude.” If researchers presented their
estimates with the proper error bounds, he said, they would see that the spread is far too
large to constitute “a meaningful quantitative estimate.”
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, scientists say. Other
episodes of mass fatality are abundantly documented: the Black Death in Europe, the
post-collectivization famine in the Soviet Union, even the traffic in African slaves. Much
less data support the notion that Old World bacteria and viruses turned the New World
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into an abattoir.
*10 Such evidence as can be found lies scribbled in the margins of
European accounts—it is, as Crosby admitted, “no better than impressionistic.”
“Most of the arguments for the very large numbers have been theoretical,”
Ubelaker told me. “But when you try to marry the theoretical arguments to the data that
are available on individual groups in different regions, it’s hard to find support for those
numbers.” Archaeologists, he said, keep searching for the settlements in which those
millions of people supposedly lived. “As more and more excavation is done, one would
expect to see more evidence for [dense populations] than has thus far emerged.” Dean R.
Snow, of Pennsylvania State, repeatedly examined precontact sites in eastern New York
and found “no support for the notion that ubiquitous pandemics swept the region.” In the
skeptics’ view, Dobyns, and other High Counters (as proponents of large pre-Columbian
numbers have been called) are like people who discover an empty bank account and
claim from its very emptiness that it once contained millions of dollars. Historians who
project large Indian populations, Low Counter critics say, are committing the intellectual
sin of arguing from silence.
Given these convincing rebuttals, why have the majority of researchers
nonetheless become High Counters? In arguing that Indians died at anomalously high
rates from European diseases, are researchers claiming that they were somehow uniquely
vulnerable? Why hypothesize the existence of vast, super-deadly pandemics that seem
unlike anything else in the historical record? The speed and scale of the projected losses
“boggle the mind,” observed Colin G. Calloway, a historian at Dartmouth—one reason,
he suggested, that researchers were so long reluctant to accept them. Indeed, how can one
understand losses of such unparalleled scope? And if the European entrance into the
Americas five centuries ago was responsible for them, what moral reverberations does
this have today?
THE GENETICS OF VULNERABILITY
In August 1967 a missionary’s two-year-old daughter came down with measles in
a village on the Toototobi River in Brazil, near the border with Venezuela. She and her
family had just returned from the Amazonian city of Manaus and had been checked and
cleared by Brazilian doctors before departure. Nonetheless the distinctive spots of
measles emerged a few days after the family’s arrival on the Toototobi. The village, like
many others in the region, was populated mainly by Yanomami Indians, a forest society
on the Brazil-Venezuela border that is among the least Westernized on earth. They had
never before encountered the measles virus. More than 150 Yanomami were in the
village at the time. Most or all caught the disease. Seventeen died despite the horrified
missionaries’ best efforts. And the virus escaped and spread throughout the Yanomami
heartland, carried by people who did not know they had been exposed.
Partly by happenstance, the U.S. geneticist James Neel and the U.S.
anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon flew into Yanomami country in the midst of the
epidemic. Neel, who had long been worried about measles, was carrying several thousand
doses of vaccine. Alas, the disease had preceded them. They frantically tried to create an
epidemiological “firebreak” by vaccinating ahead of the disease. Despite their efforts, the
affected villages had a mean death rate of 8.8 percent. Almost one out of ten people died
from a sickness that in Western societies was just a childhood annoyance.
83

Later Neel concluded that the high death rate was in part due to grief and despair,
rather than the virus itself. Still, the huge toll was historically unprecedented. The
implication, implausible at first glance, was that Indians in their virgin-soil state were
more vulnerable to European diseases than virgin-soil Europeans would have been.
Perhaps surprisingly, there is some scientific evidence that Native Americans were for
genetic reasons unusually susceptible to foreign microbes and viruses—one reason that
researchers believe that pandemics of Dobynsian scale and lethality could have occurred.
Here I must make a distinction between two types of susceptibility. The first is the
lack of acquired immunity—immunity gained from a previous exposure to a pathogen.
People who have never had chicken pox are readily infected by the virus. After they
come down with the disease, their immune system trains itself, so to speak, to fight off
the virus, and they never catch it again, no matter how often they are exposed. Most
Europeans of the day had been exposed to smallpox as children, and those who didn’t die
were immune. Smallpox and other European diseases didn’t exist in the Americas, and so
every Indian was susceptible to them in this way.
In addition to having no acquired immunity (the first kind of vulnerability), the
inhabitants of the Americas had immune systems that some researchers believe were
much more restricted than European immune systems. If these scientists are correct,
Indians as a group had less innate ability to defend themselves against epidemic disease
(the second kind of vulnerability). The combination was devastating.
The second type of vulnerability stems from a quirk of history. Archaeologists
dispute the timing and manner of Indians’ arrival in the Americas, but almost all
researchers believe that the initial number of newcomers must have been small. Their
gene pool was correspondingly restricted, which meant that Indian biochemistry was and
is unusually homogeneous. More than nine out of ten Native Americans—and almost all
South American Indians—have type O blood, for example, whereas Europeans are more
evenly split between types O and A.
Evolutionarily speaking, genetic homogeneity by itself is neither good nor bad. It
can be beneficial if it means that a population lacks deleterious genes. In 1491, the
Americas were apparently free or almost free of cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s chorea,
newborn anemia, schizophrenia, asthma, and (possibly) juvenile diabetes, all of which
have some genetic component. Here a limited gene pool may have spared Indians great
suffering.
Genetic homogeneity can be problematic, too. In the 1960s and 1970s Francis L.
Black, a virologist at Yale, conducted safety and efficacy tests among South American
Indians of a new, improved measles vaccine. During the tests he drew blood samples
from the people he vaccinated, which he later examined in the laboratory. When I
telephoned Black, he told me that the results were “thought-provoking.” Every individual
person’s immune system responded robustly to the vaccine. But the native population as
a whole had a “very limited spectrum of responses.” And that, he said, “could be a real
problem in the right circumstances.” For Indians, those circumstances arrived with
Columbus.
Black was speaking of human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), molecules inside most
human cells that are key to one of the body’s two main means of defense. Cells of all
sorts are commonly likened to biochemical factories, busy ferments in which dozens of
mechanisms are working away in complex sequences that are half Rube Goldberg, half
84

allet. Like well-run factories, cells are thrifty; part of the cellular machinery chops up
and reuses anything that is floating around inside, including bits of the cell and foreign
invaders such as viruses. Not all of the cut-up pieces are recycled. Some are passed on to
HLAs, special molecules that transport the snippets to the surface of the cell.
Outside, prowling, are white blood cells—leukocytes, to researchers. Like minute
scouts inspecting potential battle zones, leukocytes constantly scan cell walls for the little
bits of stuff that HLAs have carried there, trying to spot anything that doesn’t belong.
When a leukocyte spots an anomaly—a bit of virus, say—it destroys the infected or
contaminated cell immediately. Which means that unless an HLA lugs an invading virus
to where the leukocyte can notice it, that part of the immune system cannot know it
exists, let alone attack it.
HLAs carry their burdens to the surface by fitting them into a kind of slot. If the
snippet doesn’t fit into the slot, the HLA can’t transport it, and the rest of the immune
system won’t be able to “see” it. All people have multiple types of HLA, which means
that they can bring almost every potential problem to the attention of their leukocytes.
Not every problem, though. No matter what his or her genetic endowment, no one
person’s immune system has enough different HLAs to identify every strain of every
virus. Some things will always escape notice. Imagine someone sneezing in a crowded
elevator, releasing into the air ten variants of a rhinovirus, the kind of virus that causes
the common cold. (Viruses mutate quickly and are commonly present in the body in
multiple forms, each slightly different from the others.) For simplicity’s sake, suppose
that the other elevator passengers inhale all ten versions of the virus. One man is lucky:
he happens to have HLAs that can lock onto and carry pieces of all ten variants to the cell
surface. Because his white blood cells can identify and destroy the infected cells, this
man doesn’t get sick. Not so lucky is the woman next to him: she has a different set of
HLAs, which are able to pick up and transport only eight of the ten varieties. The other
two varieties escape the notice of her leukocytes and go on to give her a howling cold
(eventually other immune mechanisms kick in and she recovers). These disparate
outcomes illustrate the importance to a population of having multiple HLA profiles; one
person’s HLAs may miss a particular bug, but another person may be equipped to combat
it, and the population as a whole survives.
Most human groups are a scattershot mix of HLA profiles, which means that
almost always some people in the group will not get sick when exposed to a particular
pathogen. Indeed, if laboratory mice have too much HLA diversity, Black told me,
researchers can’t use them to observe the progress of an infectious disease. “You get
messy results—they don’t all get sick.” The opposite is true as well, he said. People with
similar HLA profiles fall victim to the same diseases in the same way.
In the 1990s Black reviewed thirty-six studies of South American Indians. Not to
his surprise, he discovered that overall Indians have fewer HLA types than populations
from Europe, Asia, and Africa. European populations have at least thirty-five main HLA
classes, whereas Indian groups have no more than seventeen. In addition, Native
American HLA profiles are dominated by an unusually small number of types. About one
third of South American Indians, Black discovered, have identical or near-identical HLA
profiles; for Africans the figure is one in two hundred. In South America, he estimated,
the minimum probability that a pathogen in one host will next encounter a host with a
similar immune spectrum is about 28 percent; in Europe, the chance is less than 2
85

percent. As a result, Black argued, “people of the New World are unusually susceptible to
*11
diseases of the Old.”
Actually, some Old World populations were just as vulnerable as Native
Americans to those diseases, and likely for the same reason. Indians’ closest genetic
relatives are indigenous Siberians. They did not come into substantial contact with
Europeans until the sixteenth century, when Russian fur merchants overturned their
governments, established military outposts throughout the region, and demanded furs in
tribute. In the train of the Russian fur market came Russian diseases, notably smallpox.
The parallels with the Indian experience are striking. In 1768 the virus struck
Siberia’s Pacific coast, apparently for the first time. “No one knows how many have
survived,” confessed the governor of Irkutsk, the Russian base on Lake Baikal,
apparently because officials were afraid to travel to the affected area. A decade later, in
1779, the round-the-globe expedition of Captain James Cook reached Kamchatka, the
long peninsula on the Pacific coast. The shoreline, the British discovered, was a
cemetery. “We every where met with the Ruins of large Villages with no Traces left of
them but the Foundation of the Houses,” lamented David Samwell, the ship’s surgeon.
“The Russians told us that [the villages] were destroyed by the small Pox.” The explorer
Martin Sauer, who visited Kamchatka five years after Cook’s expedition, discovered that
the Russian government had at last ventured into the former epidemic zone. Scarcely one
thousand natives remained on the peninsula, according to official figures; the disease had
claimed more than five thousand lives. The tally cannot be taken as exact, but the fact
remains: a single epidemic killed more than three of every four indigenous Siberians in
that area.
After a few such experiences, the natives tried to fight back. “As soon as
[indigenous Siberians] learn that smallpox or other contagious diseases are in town,” the
political exile Heinrich von Füch wrote, “they set up sentries along all the roads, armed
with bows and arrows, and they will not allow anyone to come into their settlements from
town. Likewise, they will not accept Russian flour or other gifts, lest these be
contaminated with smallpox.” Their efforts were in vain. Despite extreme precautions,
disease cut down native Siberians again and again.
After learning about this sad history I again telephoned Francis Black. Being
genetically determined, Indian HLA homogeneity cannot be changed (except by
intermarriage with non-Indians). Did that mean that the epidemics were unavoidable? I
asked. Suppose that the peoples of the Americas had, in some parallel world, understood
the concept of contagion and been prepared to act on it. Could the mass death have been
averted?
“There have been lots of cases where individual towns kept out epidemics,” Black
said. During plague episodes, “medieval cities would barricade themselves behind their
walls and kill people who tried to come in. But whole countries—that’s much harder.
England has kept out rabies. That’s the biggest success story that comes to mind, offhand.
But rabies is primarily an animal disease, which helps, because you only have to watch
the ports—you don’t have many undocumented aliens sneaking in with sick dogs. And
rabies is not highly contagious, so even if it slips through it is unlikely to spread.”
He stopped speaking for long enough that I asked him if he was still on the line.
“I’m trying to imagine how you would do it,” he said. “If Indians in Florida let in
sick people, the effects could reach all the way up to here in Connecticut. So all these
86

different groups would have had to coordinate the blockade together. And they’d have to
do it for centuries—four hundred years—until the invention of vaccines. Naturally they’d
want to trade, furs for knives, that kind of thing. But the trade would have to be
conducted in antiseptic conditions.”
The Abenaki sent goods to Verrazzano on a rope strung from ship to shore, I said.
“You’d have to have the entire hemisphere doing that. And the Europeans would
presumably have to cooperate, or most of them, anyway. I can’t imagine that happening,
actually. Any of it.”
Did that mean the epidemics were inevitable and there was nothing to be done?
The authorities, he replied, could “try to maintain isolation, as I was saying. But
that ends up being paternalistic and ineffective. Or they can endorse marriage and
procreation with outsiders, which risks destroying the society they supposedly are trying
to preserve. I’m not sure what I’d recommend. Except getting these communities some
decent health care, which they almost never have.”
Except for death, he went on, nothing in medicine is inevitable. “But I don’t see
how it [waves of epidemics from European diseases] could have been prevented for very
long. That’s a terrible thought. But I’ve been working with highly contagious diseases for
forty years, and I can tell you that in the long run it is almost impossible to keep them
*12
out.”
“OUR EYES WERE APPALLED WITH TERROR”
A second reason historians believe that epidemics tore through Native American
communities before Europeans arrived is that epidemics also did it after Europeans
arrived. In her book Pox Americana (2001), the Duke University historian Elizabeth Fenn
meticulously pieced together evidence that the Western Hemisphere was visited by two
smallpox pandemics shortly before and during the Revolutionary War. The smaller of the
two apparently began outside Boston in early 1774 and lurked in the area for the next
several years like a sniper, picking off victims at the rate of ten to thirty a day. In Boston
the Declaration of Independence was overshadowed by the previous day’s proclamation
of a citywide campaign of inoculation (an early, risky form of vaccination in which
people deliberately infected themselves with a mild dose of smallpox to produce
immunity).
Even as it besieged Boston, the virus also spread down the eastern seaboard,
laying waste as far as Georgia. It wreaked havoc on the Ani Yun Wiya (the group often
called the Cherokee, which is a mildly insulting name coined by their enemies, the Creek
confederation) and the Haudenosaunee (the indigenous name for the six nations that
made up what Europeans called the Iroquois League). Both were important allies of the
British, and after the epidemic neither was able to fight the colonists successfully.
Smallpox also ruined the British plan to raise an army of slaves and indentured servants
by promising them freedom after the war—the disease killed off most of the “Ethiopian
regiment” even as it assembled.
An equal-opportunity killer, smallpox ravaged the rebels, too. The virus had been
endemic in Europe for centuries, which meant that most Europeans were exposed to it
before adulthood. But it was only an occasional, terrible visitor in the Americas, which
meant that most adult colonists had not acquired childhood immunity. On an individual
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level, they were almost as vulnerable as Indians. On a group level, though, they were less
genetically homogeneous, which conferred some relative advantage; the virus would
sweep through them, but not kill quite so many. Still, so many soldiers in the Continental
army fell during the epidemic that revolutionary leaders feared that the disease would
bring an end to their revolt. “The small Pox! The small Pox!” John Adams wrote to his
wife, Abigail. “What shall We do with it?” His worries were on target: the virus, not the
British, stopped the Continental army’s drive into Quebec in 1776. In retrospect, Fenn
told me, “One of George Washington’s most brilliant moves was to inoculate the army
against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of ’78.” Without inoculation, she said,
the smallpox epidemic could easily have handed the colonies back to the British.
Even as the first outbreak faded, Fenn wrote, a second, apparently unrelated
epidemic burned through Mexico City. The first cases occurred in August 1779. By
year’s end perhaps eighteen thousand had died in the city area and the disease was racing
through the countryside in every direction. Communications in those days were too poor
to permit us to document a transmission chain, but records show smallpox flaring in
separate explosions to the south like a chain of firecrackers: Guatemala (1780–81),
Colombia (1781–83), Ecuador (1783). Was the virus retracing a journey to Tawantinsuyu
it had taken before? “It seems likely,” decided Calloway, the Dartmouth historian. Fenn
tried to trace the virus as it went north. Like Dobyns, she examined parish burial records.
In 1780 a telltale surge of mortality traveled north along the heavily traveled road to
Santa Fe. From there, smallpox apparently exploded into most of western North America.
First to suffer, or so the sketchy evidence suggests, were the Hopi. Already
reeling from a drought, they were blasted by smallpox—as many as nine out of ten may
have died. When the Spanish governor tried to recruit the Hopi to live in missions, their
leaders told him not to bother: the epidemic soon would expunge them from the earth. As
if drought and contagion were not enough, the Hopi were constantly under attack by the
Nermernuh (or Nemene), a fluid collection of hunting bands known today as the
Comanche (the name, awarded by an enemy group, means “people who fight us all the
time”). Originally based north of Santa Fe, the Nermernuh were on their way to
dominating the southern plains; they had driven away their Apache and Hopi rivals with
trip-hammer ambushes and deadly incursions and were bent on doing the same to any
European colonists who ventured in. In 1781 the raiding abruptly stopped. Silence for
eighteen months. Was the ceasefire due to Mexico City smallpox that had been
transmitted by the Hopi? Four years afterward, a traveler noted in his diary that the
Nermernuh lived in fear of disease because they had been recently struck by
smallpox—tenuous but suggestive evidence.
What is certain is that both Hopi and Nermernuh were part of a network of
exchange that had hummed with vitality since ancient times and had recently grown more
intense with the arrival of horses, which sped up communication. Smallpox raced along
the network through the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, ricocheting among the
Mandans, Hidatsas, Ojibwes, Crows, Blackfoot, and Shoshone, a helter-skelter progress
in which a virus leapfrogged from central Mexico to the shore of Hudson Bay in less than
two years. Indians in the northern Great Plains kept “winter counts,” oral chronologies of
the most important events in each year. Often the counts were accompanied by a spiraling
sequence of drawings on a hide, with each year summarized by a drawing as an
aide-mémoire. In several Lakota (Sioux) counts 1780–81 was bleakly summed as the
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year of Smallpox Used Them Up; and the Lakota were not the only ones affected.
In 1781 a company of Blackfoot stumbled across a Shoshone camp at dawn near
the Red Deer River in Alberta. The Blackfoot were a tightly organized confederation of
groups that inhabited the plains between the Missouri and Saskatchewan Rivers.
Equipped with guns and horses from French traders, they had pushed their southern
neighbors, the Shoshone—left at a disadvantage because they had no access to the French
and their goods, and the Spanish, whom they did have access to, tried to block Indian
access to weapons—from the plains into the mountains of what are now Wyoming and
Colorado. When the Shoshone finally obtained guns—they traded with their linguistic
cousins, the Nermernuh, who took the weapons as booty from defeated Spaniards—open
warfare broke out. In this bellicose context, the Blackfoot party knew exactly what to do
when it happened upon a slumbering Shoshone encampment. With “sharp flat daggers
and knives,” one of the raiders later remembered, they silently sliced open the Shoshone
tents “and entered for the fight; but our war whoops instantly stopt, our eyes were
appalled with terror; there was no one to fight with but the dead and the dying, each a
mass of corruption.” The Blackfoot did not touch the bodies, but were infected anyway.
When the company returned home, the raider lamented, smallpox “spread from one tent
to another as if the Bad Spirit carried it.”
According to Fenn, “the great preponderance of the evidence” indicates that the
Shoshone also transmitted smallpox down the Columbia River into the Pacific Northwest.
Calloway suggests the Crow as a plausible alternative. Whoever passed on the virus, its
effects were still visible a decade later in 1792, when the British navigator George
Vancouver led the first European expedition to survey Puget Sound. Like Cook’s crew in
Kamchatka, he found a charnel house: deserted villages, abandoned fishing boats, human
remains “promiscuously scattered about the beach, in great numbers.” Everything they
saw suggested “that at no very remote period this country had been far more populous
than at present.” The few suffering survivors, noted Second Lieutenant Peter Puget, were
“most terribly pitted…indeed many have lost their Eyes.”
Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine. When plague
appeared, they boarded up houses and fled to the countryside. By contrast, the historian
Neal Salisbury observed, family and friends in Indian New England gathered at the
sufferer’s bedside to wait out the illness, a practice that “could only have served to spread
the disease more rapidly.” Even the idea of contagion itself was novel. “We had no belief
that one Man could give [a disease] to another,” the Blackfoot raider remembered, “any
more than a wounded Man could give his wound to another.” Because they knew of no
protective measures, the toll was even higher than it would have been.
Living in the era of antibiotics, we find it difficult to imagine the simultaneous
deaths of siblings, parents, relatives, and friends. As if by a flash of grim light, Indian
villages became societies of widows, widowers, and orphans; parents lost their children,
and children were suddenly alone. Rare is the human spirit that remains buoyant in a
holocaust. “My people have been so unhappy for so long they wish to disincrease, rather
than to multiply,” a Paiute woman wrote in 1883. A Lakota winter count memorialized
the year 1784 with a stark image: a pox-scarred man, alone in a tipi, shooting himself.
Disease not only shattered the family bonds that were the underlying foundation
of Indian societies, it wiped out the political superstructure at the top. King Liholiho
Kamehameha II and Queen Kamamalu of Hawai‘i visited Great Britain on a diplomatic
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mission in 1824. While staying in a posh London hotel and attending the theater in the
English king’s own box, the royal couple and most of the rest of their party came down
with measles. It killed the queen on July 8. The grieving king died six days later, at the
age of twenty-seven. The death of the royal couple ushered in a time of social chaos. It
was as catastrophic for Hawai‘i as the death of Wayna Qhapaq for Tawantinsuyu.
A particularly poignant loss occurred in the summer of 1701, when the leaders of
forty native nations convened in Montreal to negotiate an end to decades of war among
themselves and the French. Death stalked the congress in the form of influenza. By then
the Indians of the Northeast knew such diseases all too well: sickness had carried off so
many members of the Haudenosaunee that the alliance was forced to replenish itself by
adopting abductees and prisoners of war. At the time of the conference at least a quarter
of the Haudenosaunee were former captives. At great personal risk, many Indian leaders
attended the conference even after they knew that influenza was in Montreal. Dozens
died. Among them was the Huron leader Kondiaronk, a famed orator who had, more than
any other, convened the gathering as a last-ditch effort to avoid internecine conflict. His
body was placed on a bed of beaver pelts, covered by a scarlet cloth, and surrounded by a
copper pot, a rifle, and a sword. In their diversity, the objects symbolized the peaceful
mixing of cultures that Kondiaronk hoped lay in the future.
Nobody knows how many died during the pandemics of the 1770s and 1780s, but
even if one had a number it wouldn’t begin to tally the impact. Disease turned whole
societies to ash. Six Cree groups in western Canada disappeared after 1781; the Blackfoot
nation, blasted by smallpox, sent peace emissaries to Shoshone bands, only to find that all
had vanished. “The country to the south was empty and silent,” Calloway wrote. So
broken were the Omaha by disease that according to tradition they launched a
deliberately suicidal attack against their enemies. Those who did not die quit their
villages and became homeless wanderers.
Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked,
each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books
were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many
Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or
never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone. And not
just once, but over and over again. In our antibiotic era, how can we imagine what it
means to have entire ways of life hiss away like steam? How can one assay the total
impact of the unprecedented calamity that gave rise to the world we live in? It seems
important to try. I would submit that the best way to come near to encompassing the scale
and kind of the loss, and its causes, is to look at the single case where the intellectual life
of a Native American society is almost as well documented as its destruction.
FLOWERS AND SONG
In 1524, according to colonial accounts, an extraordinary face-off took place in
one of the great buildings of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Triple Alliance—the Aztec
empire, as it is better known—which Hernán Cortés had conquered three years before.
*13 Facing each other across a room, two delegations of elite clerics battled over the
nature of God. On one side were twelve eminent Franciscan monks, who had traveled
from Europe in a mission authorized by Pope Hadrian VI. On the other were twelve high
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priests from the Triple Alliance, men who had wielded immense spiritual and political
power until Cortés shuttered the grand temples and brought down the clerisy. Although
the pope in Rome had authorized the friars’ mission, all twelve were Spanish, because
Spain had conquered the empire, and because Spain, which had spent centuries extracting
itself from the rule of African Muslims, had experience with powerful alien ideologies.
Analogously, the priests of the Triple Alliance were probably all Mexica. The Mexica
were the dominant partner in the Alliance, and they had founded and populated
Tenochtitlan, the empire’s biggest city.
The Franciscans’ mission had begun with a request by Cortés. Cortés believed
that the military conquest of the Alliance had to be accompanied and justified by an
equivalent spiritual conquest. The Indians, he said, must be led to salvation. And he asked
King Charles V of Spain for some priests to do the job. In turn the king turned to the pope
for his blessing and advice. Cortés did not want “bishops and pampered prelates,” wrote
historian William H. Prescott, “who too often squandered the substance of the Church in
riotous living, but…men of unblemished purity of life, nourished with the learning of the
cloister, [who] counted all personal sacrifices as little in the cause to which they were
devoted.”
Led by the intellectual Martín de Valencia, a man so dedicated to ascetic faith that
he ended his days as a hermit in the Mexican desert, the friars intended to guide Spain’s
new subjects along the exhilarating path to Christendom. The monks understood that the
Mexica already had a church—a false church intended to snare their souls for the devil,
but a church nonetheless. And they knew that the Indians were too numerous to be
reached by even the most zealous missionaries. Valencia’s plan was conversion by proxy:
he and the rest of the twelve would open the eyes of the Indian priesthood to the beauties
of the true faith, gaining their adherence by reasoned theological discussion, and then the
priests would fan out and spread the Gospel in their native tongue.
The sole record of the discussions between the monks and the Mexica was
compiled four decades later by another Franciscan, Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún
knew ten of the twelve Spaniards at the meeting, interviewed four of the Mexica priests,
and filled in gaps by extrapolating from similar theological discussions in which he had
participated. Written in dialogue verse, an opera seria exchange of long recitatives, his
reconstruction does not individually identify the speakers—perhaps, some historians
believe, because the great meeting did not actually take place, Sahagún’s account being a
distillation of many smaller encounters. Only part of the original manuscript survives,
written in Nahuatl, the Mexica language, which Sahagún learned to speak fluently. Still,
what remains is enough to indicate how the Mexica viewed their position vis-à-vis the
Spanish: defeated, but not unequal.
In Sahagún’s reconstruction, the Franciscans speak first, their interpreters
struggling to make European concepts clear in Nahuatl verse, the language of high
discourse. The monks explain that they have been sent by “the one who on the earth is the
greater speaker of divine things,” the pope, to bring the “venerable word / of the One Sole
True God” to New Spain. By worshipping at false altars, the friars say, “you cause Him
an injured heart, / by which you live in His anger, His ire.” So infuriated was the
Christian God by the Indians’ worship of idols and demons that he sent out “the
Spaniards, /…those who afflicted you with tormenting sorrow, / by which you were
punished / so that you ceased / these not few injuries to His precious heart.” The Triple
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Alliance was subjugated, in other words, because its people had failed to recognize the
One True God. By accepting the Bible, the priests explain, the Mexica “will be able to
cool the heart / of He by Whom All Live, / so He will not completely destroy you.”
The Mexica respond immediately. Not wanting to join Christendom, they also
know that they cannot prevail in a direct confrontation with their conquerors. Shrewdly,
they try to shift the terms of the argument to more congenial rhetorical ground—an
approach that will force the friars to treat them as equals. “What now, immediately, will
we say?” the lead cleric asks. “We are those who shelter the people, / We are mothers to
the people, fathers to the people.” Translation: We priests are in the same business as you
Franciscans. We are high-ranking clerics, elite intellectuals, just like you. And just like
you we have a function: providing comfort and meaning to the common folk. To disavow
their faith, the Mexica say, would tear apart their lives. For this reason and others, the
priests explain, “we cannot yet agree to [Christianity] ourselves / We do not yet make it
true for ourselves.” Behind the priests’ refusal is an implied request: You know what it is
like to be in our shoes. You carry the same responsibilities. As one group of highly
placed religious functionaries to another, don’t do this to us!
Having expected childlike natives, empty vessels waiting to be filled by the Word,
the Franciscans instead found themselves fencing with skilled rhetoricians, proud of their
intellectual traditions. In the end the friars resorted to a crude but effective argument: the
Indians had to pledge fealty to the Christian god, because their own “gods were not
powerful enough to liberate them from the hands of the Spaniards.” In a sober ceremony,
the Mexica abjured their old religion and embraced Christianity.
For more than a decade, Sahagún and other religious authorities regarded the
conversion as atriumph. He initially began his reconstruction of the debate to
commemorate it. But he never published the manuscript, because he was slowly coming
to believe that the Church’s efforts in New Spain had been a failure. Despite lip-service
devotion to the Gospel, the Mexica remained outside Christendom, as do some of their
descendants to this day.
Sahagún is known as the first American anthropologist, for he labored for decades
to understand the Indians he sought to convert. With other missionaries, he amassed an
archive on the Mexica and their neighbors—dynastic histories, dictionaries of native
languages, descriptions of customs, collections of poetry and drama, galleries of paintings
and sculpture—unequaled by that on any other Indian group, even the Inka. From it
emerges, in almost full detail, a group portrait of a kind that is usually obscured by loss.
Masters of power politics, engineers of genius, the Mexica were also upstarts and
pretenders, arrivistes who falsely claimed a brilliant line of descent. They are best known
for assembling the greatest empire ever seen in Mesoamerica. But their finest
accomplishment may have been the creation of a remarkable intellectual tradition, one
that like the Greeks began with the questions of lyric poets and then went on to distinct
schools of inquiry associated with elite academies.
Mexica histories begin by relating their migration to the Basin of Mexico. Fringed
by mountains, the basin was about a hundred miles long from north to south and perhaps
half that size from east to west. At its center was Lake Texcoco, a fifty-mile-long
volcanic lake with exceptionally clear, clean water. Around the time of Christ, a small
village on its northeast periphery named Teotihuacan emerged as a military power.
During the next four centuries its realm steadily expanded until it ruled directly over
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much of central Mexico and indirectly, through puppet governments, as far south as
Guatemala. Its eponymous capital then may have had 200,000 inhabitants, enormous at
the time; its ruins, an hour by bus from Mexico City, are among the few remnants of the
ancient world that today don’t seem small.
The city was organized around the Avenue of the Dead, a miles-long, north-south
boulevard that cut straight as an ax stroke across the landscape. From the northern end of
the avenue rose the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, each as big as the biggest Egyptian
pyramids. To their south sprawled the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, where the
empire’s rulers, as ruthless and preoccupied with national glory as so many Bismarcks,
considered what to do with their soldiers. Despite the empire’s fame and power, its
history is still little known; archaeologists do not know what language its people spoke,
or even its proper name (“Teotihuacan” was coined centuries later). It had writing of
some kind, though it seems not to have been used much; in any case the script has not
been deciphered.
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At about 200 feet tall and 700 feet on a side, the Pyramid of the Sun in
Teotihuacan is the world’s third-largest pyramid. It was built in stages in the second and
third centuries A.D. atop a deep, 300-foot cave created by a lava tube that may have
represented the place where humankind emerged onto the earth. The pyramid and the rest
of the city are oriented on a rectilinear grid 15° 25” from true north, a direction that may
have aligned with the cave mouth.
Teotihuacan fell in the eighth century for reasons yet unknown, but left an
enduring mark in central Mexico. Three hundred years afterward the rising Toltec styled
themselves its heirs. They, too, built an empire, which fell amid internal dissension in
about 1200 A.D. The collapse of the Toltec created an opening in the warm, fertile basin.
Into it moved half a dozen groups from the northern and western desert, the Mexica
among them.
The Mexica were an unlikely choice for heir to the imperial tradition of
Teotihuacan and the Toltecs. Poor and unsophisticated, they probably came to Lake
Texcoco about 1250 A.D. and became vassals of more important groups. Eventually
some enemies drove them away from the fertile shore. The Mexica fled to a swampy,
uninhabited island. According to an account by Hernando Álvaro Tezozómoc, grandson
of the last Mexica ruler, the refugees stumbled about the island for days, looking for food
and a place to settle, until one of the priests had a vision in a dream. In the dream, the
Mexica’s patron deity instructed his people to look in the swamp for a cactus. Standing
on the cactus, the god promised, “you shall see an eagle…warming itself in the sun.”
And [the next morning], once more, they went in among the rushes, in among the
reeds, to the edge of the spring.
And when they came out into the reeds,
There at the edge of the spring was the tenochtli [a cactus fruit],
And they saw an eagle on the tenochtli, perched on it, standing on it.
It was eating something, it was feeding,
It was pecking at what it was eating.
And when the eagle saw the Mexica, he bowed his head low.
Its nest, its pallet, was of every kind of precious feather—
Of lovely cotinga feathers, roseate spoonbill feathers, quetzal feathers.
And they also saw strewn about the heads of sundry birds,
The heads of precious birds strung together,
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And some birds’ feet and bones.
And the god called out to them, he said to them,
“Oh Mexica, it shall be there!”
(But the Mexica did not see who spoke.)
It was for this reason that they call it Tenochtitlan.
And the Mexica wept, they said,
“Oh happy, oh blessed are we!
We have beheld the city that shall be ours!
Let us go now, let us rest….”
This was in the year…1325.
In this way came into being Tenochtitlan, sole rival, in size and opulence, to
Teotihuacan.
Among the Mexica, a council of clan elders chose the overall ruler. Or, rather,
chose the overall rulers—the Mexica divided authority between a tlatoani (literally,
“speaker”), a diplomatic and military commander who controlled relations with other
groups, and a cihuacoatl (literally, “female serpent”), who supervised internal affairs. For
a century after Tenochtitlan’s birth, the tlatoani’s position was unenviable. The Mexica
were subordinated by a nearby city-state on the shore, and the tlatoani was forced to send
Mexica men as conscripts for its wars. Only in 1428 did Itzacoatl, a newly selected
tlatoani, ally with two other small vassal states to overthrow their mutual overlords. In
victory, the three groups officially formed the Triple Alliance, with the Mexica the most
powerful leg of the tripod. Like Tawantinsuyu, the empire grew rapidly. Its presiding
genius was not Itzacoatl, though, but his nephew Tlacaelel (1398–1480).
During his long life Tlacaelel was twice offered the position of tlatoani but turned
it down both times. Preferring the less glorious and supposedly less influential position of
cihuacoatl, head of internal affairs, he ruled from behind the scenes, dominating the
Alliance for more than fifty years and utterly reengineering Mexica society. Born to an
elite family, Tlacaelel first became known at the age of thirty, when he inspired the
Mexica to revolt against their masters, supervised the gestation of the Alliance, and
served as Itzacoatl’s general during the assault. After the victory he met with Itzacoatl
and the Mexica clan leaders. In addition to taking slaves and booty, wartime victors in
central Mexico often burned their enemies’ codices, the hand-painted picture-texts in
which priests recorded their people’s histories. Tlacaelel insisted that in addition to
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destroying the codices of their former oppressors the Mexica should set fire to their own
codices. His explanation for this idea can only be described as Orwellian: “It is not fitting
that our people / Should know these pictures. / Our people, our subjects, will be lost /
And our land destroyed, / For these pictures are full of lies.” The “lies” were the
inconvenient fact that the Mexica past was one of poverty and humiliation. To motivate
the people properly, Tlacaelel said, the priesthood should rewrite Mexica history by
creating new codices, adding in the great deeds whose lack now seemed embarrassing
and adorning their ancestry with ties to the Toltecs and Teotihuacan.
A visionary and patriot, Tlacaelel believed that the Mexica were destined to rule a
vast empire. But because ambition succeeds best when disguised by virtue, he wanted to
furnish the Alliance with an animating ideology—a manifest destiny, as it were, or
mission civilisatrice. He came up with a corker: a theogony that transformed the Mexica
into keepers of the cosmic order.
At its center was Huitzilopochtli, a martial god who wore a helmet shaped like a
hummingbird’s head and carried a fire-breathing serpent as a weapon. Huitzilopochtli had
long been the Mexica’s patron deity. It was he who had entered the Mexica priest’s
dream to explain where to found Tenochtitlan. After the formation of the Triple Alliance,
Tlacaelel “went about persuading the people,” as one Mexica historian wrote, that
Huitzilopochtli was not a mere tutelary deity, but a divinity essential to the fate of
humankind.
At the apex of the celestial hierarchy stood Ometeotl, the omnipresent sustainer of
the cosmos, “the Lord of the Close Vicinity” in Nahuatl. In Tlacaelel’s vision, Ometeotl
had four sons, one of whom was Huitzilopochtli. These four sons had been vying for
supremacy since the beginning of time; the history of the universe was mainly a record of
their endless struggle. At intervals the brothers would wrestle themselves into a
precarious equilibrium, like sumo giants straining motionlessly against each other in the
ring, with one brother on top and the other three in a temporary, isometric balance below.
In these interregnums of order, Tlacaelel explained, the topmost brother linked himself to
the sun, on which all living creatures depend.
In some versions of the story, the brother became the sun; in others, he merely
supervised its workings. Either way, life could exist only when one brother held sway and
the cosmic battle quieted and the sun was able to shine. But when the balance came apart,
as it always did, the brothers would resume their strife. The sun would go dark, sinking
the cosmos into an endless, lethal night. Eventually the sons would arrive at a new
transitory order and reignite the sun, letting existence begin anew. This apocalyptic cycle
had occurred four times before. The Mexica lived during the Fifth Sun, when the sun was
identified with Huitzilopochtli.
The sun’s role was hellishly difficult, Tlacaelel said. Even when the strife among
Ometeotl’s sons quieted enough to allow the sun to shine, it still had to battle the stars
and moon every day as it rose in the sky—a literal struggle of light against darkness.
Each day of sunlight was a victory that must be fought and won again the next day.
Because the sun could not hold out forever against its foes, one sixteenth-century Nahuatl
account explained, it would one day inevitably lose—there was no getting around it. “In
this Sun it shall come to pass / That the earth shall move, / That there shall be famine, /
And that we all shall perish.” But the calamity could be postponed, at least for a while, if
the sun was fortified for its battles with the stars. To gain strength, the sun needed
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chalchíhuatl—the mysterious, ineffable fluid of life-energy. The sacred mission of the
Triple Alliance, Tlacaelel proclaimed, was to furnish this vital substance to
Huitzilopochtli, who would then use it for the sun, postponing the death of everyone on
the planet.
There was but one method for obtaining this life-energy: ritual human sacrifice.
To obtain the victims, Tlacaelel said (according to one of Sahagún’s contemporaries), the
sun needed a “marketplace” where he could “go with his army [that is, the army of the
Triple Alliance] to buy victims, men for him to eat…. And this will be a good thing, for it
will be as if he had his maize cakes hot from the griddle—tortillas from a nearby place,
hot and ready to eat whenever he wishes them.” Occasionally the victims were slaves and
criminals, but mainly they were prisoners of war. In this way the sacred mission of the
Triple Alliance became translated into a secular mission: to obtain prisoners to sacrifice
for the sun, the Alliance had to take over the world. In Tlacaelel’s scheme, imperial
conquests were key to “the moral combat against evil,” explained Miguel León-Portilla, a
Mexican historian who has devoted much of his career to analyzing Mexica thought.
“The survival of the universe depended on them.”
Human sacrifice is such a charged subject that its practice by the Triple Alliance
has inevitably become shrouded in myths. Two are important here. The first is that
human sacrifice was never practiced—the many post-conquest accounts of public
death-spectacles are all racist lies. It was indeed in the Spanish interest to exaggerate the
extent of human sacrifice, because ending what Cortés called this “most horrid and
abominable custom” became a post hoc rationale for conquest. But the many vividly
depicted ceremonies in Mexica art and writing leave little doubt that it occurred—and on
a large scale. (Cortés may well have been correct when he estimated that sacrifice
claimed “three or four thousand souls” a year.)
The second myth is that in its appetite for death as spectacle the Triple Alliance
was fundamentally different from Europe. Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics
burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris—Europeans flocked to
every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds.
London, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, held public executions eight times a year
at Tyburn, just north of Hyde Park. (The diplomat Samuel Pepys paid a shilling for a
good view of a Tyburn hanging in 1664; watching the victim beg for mercy, he wrote,
was a crowd of “at least 12 or 14,000 people.”) In most if not all European nations, the
bodies were impaled on city walls and strung along highways as warnings. “The corpses
dangling from trees whose distant silhouettes stand out against the sky, in so many old
paintings, are merely a realistic detail,” Braudel observed. “They were part of the
landscape.” Between 1530 and 1630, according to Cambridge historian V. A. C. Gatrell,
England executed seventy-five thousand people. At the time, its population was about
three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if
England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average,
about 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortés estimated for the empire.
France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England, according to Braudel.
In their penchant for ceremonial public slaughter, the Alliance and Europe were
more alike than either side grasped. In both places the public death was accompanied by
the reading of ritual scripts. And in both the goal was to create a cathartic paroxysm of
loyalty to the government—in the Mexica case, by recalling the spiritual justification for
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the empire; in the European case, to reassert the sovereign’s divine power after it had
been injured by a criminal act. Most important, neither society should be judged—or in
the event judged each other—entirely by its brutality. Who today would want to live in
the Greece of Plato and Socrates, with its slavery, constant warfare, institutionalized
pederasty, and relentless culling of surplus population? Yet Athens had a coruscating
tradition of rhetoric, lyric drama, and philosophy. So did Tenochtitlan and the other cities
in the Triple Alliance. In fact, the corpus of writings in classical Nahuatl, the language of
the Alliance, is even larger than the corpus of texts in classical Greek.
The Nahuatl word tlamatini (literally, “he who knows things”) meant something
akin to “thinker-teacher”—a philosopher, if you will. The tlamatini, who “himself was
writing and wisdom,” was expected to write and maintain the codices and live in a way
that set a moral example. “He puts a mirror before others,” the Mexica said. In what may
have been the first large-scale compulsory education program in history, every male
citizen of the Triple Alliance, no matter what his social class, had to attend one sort of
school or another until the age of sixteen. Many tlamatinime (the plural form of the word)
taught at the elite academies that trained the next generation of priests, teachers, and high
administrators.
Like Greek philosophy, the teachings of the tlamatinime were only tenuously
connected to the official dogma of Tlacaelel. (To be sure, Plato does have Socrates subtly
“correct” Homer, because the gods supposedly couldn’t have behaved in the immoral
way described by the poet. But by and large the Greek pantheon on Mount Olympus
plays no role in either Plato or Aristotle.) But the tlamatinime shared the religion’s sense
of the evanescence of existence. “Truly do we live on Earth?” asked a poem or song
attributed to Nezahualcóyotl (1402–72), a founding figure in Mesoamerican thought and
the tlatoani of Texcoco, one of the other two members of the Triple Alliance. His lyric,
among the most famous in the Nahuatl canon, answers its own question:
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
Be it jade, it shatters.
Be it gold, it breaks.
Be it a quetzal feather, it tears apart.
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
In another verse assigned to Nezahualcóyotl this theme emerged even more
baldly:
Like a painting, we will be erased.
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Like a flower, we will dry up here on earth.
Like plumed vestments of the precious bird,
That precious bird with the agile neck,
We will come to an end.
Contemplating mortality, thinkers in many cultures have drawn solace from the
prospect of life after death. This consolation was denied to the Mexica, who were
agonizingly uncertain about what happened to the soul. “Do flowers go to the region of
the dead?” Nezahualcóyotl asked. “In the Beyond, are we still dead or do we live?” Many
if not most tlamatinime saw existence as Nabokov feared: “a brief crack of light between
two eternities of darkness.”
In Nahuatl rhetoric, things were frequently represented by the unusual device of
naming two of their elements—a kind of doubled Homeric epithet. Instead of directly
mentioning his body, a poet might refer to “my hand, my foot” (noma nocxi), which the
savvy listener would know was a synecdoche, in the same way that readers of English
know that writers who mention “the crown” are actually talking about the entire monarch,
and not just the headgear. Similarly, the poet’s speech would be “his word, his breath”
(itlatol ihiyo). A double-barreled term for “truth” is neltilitztli tzintliztli, which means
something like “fundamental truth, true basic principle.” In Nahuatl, the words almost
shimmer with connotation: what was true was well grounded, stable and immutable,
enduring above all.
Because we human beings are transitory, our lives as ephemeral as dreams, the
tlamatinime suggested that immutable truth is by its nature beyond human experience. On
the ever-changing earth, wrote León-Portilla, the Mexican historian, “nothing is ‘true’ in
the Nahuatl sense of the word.” Time and again, the tlamatinime wrestled with this
dilemma. How can beings of the moment grasp the perduring? It would be like asking a
stone to understand mortality.
According to León-Portilla, one exit from this philosophical blind alley was seen
by the fifteenth-century poet Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, who described it metaphorically, as
poets will, by invoking the coyolli bird, known for its bell-like song:
He goes his way singing, offering flowers.
And his words rain down
Like jade and quetzal plumes.
Is this what pleases the Giver of Life?
Is that the only truth on earth?
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Ayocuan’s remarks cannot be fully understood out of the Nahuatl context,
León-Portilla argued. “Flowers and song” was a standard double epithet for poetry, the
highest art; “jade and quetzal feathers” was a synecdoche for great value, in the way that
Europeans might refer to “gold and silver.” The song of the bird, spontaneously
produced, stands for aesthetic inspiration. Ayocuan was suggesting, León-Portilla said,
that there is a time when humankind can touch the enduring truths that underlie our
fleeting lives. That time is at the moment of artistic creation. “From whence come the
flowers [the artistic creations] that enrapture man?” asks the poet. “The songs that
intoxicate, the lovely songs?” And he answers: “Only from His [that is, Ometeotl’s]
home do they come, from the innermost part of heaven.” Through art alone, the Mexica
said, can human beings approach the real.
Cut short by Cortés, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as
Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its
way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime
meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French
philosophes and the Taisho-period Kyoto school. The musings of the tlamatinime
occurred in intellectual neighborhoods frequented by philosophers from Brussels to
Beijing, but the mix was entirely the Mexica’s own. Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and
Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their
existence—and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the
distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human
enterprise as a whole.
Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of
novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the
other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than
the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the
Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult
if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!
Here and there we see clues to what might have been. Pacific Northwest Indian
artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas-reliefs, and totem poles within the dictates of
an elaborate aesthetic system based on an ovoid shape that has no name in European
languages. British ships in the nineteenth century radically transformed native art by
giving the Indians brightly colored paints that unlike native pigments didn’t wash off in
the rain. Indians incorporated the new pigments into their traditions, expanding them and
in the process creating an aesthetic nouvelle vague. European surrealists came across this
colorful new art in the first years of the twentieth century. As artists will, they stole
everything they could, transfiguring the images further. Their interest helped a new
generation of indigenous artists to explore new themes.
Now envision this kind of fertile back-and-forth happening in a hundred ways
with a hundred cultures—the gifts from four centuries of intellectual exchange. One can
hardly imagine anything more valuable. Think of the fruitful impact on Europe and its
descendants from contacting Asia. Imagine the effect on these places and people from a
second Asia. Along with the unparalleled loss of life, that is what vanished when
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smallpox came ashore.
ASSIGNING BLAME
Weighing loss of such scale, one naturally wants to identify and denounce the
responsible party. In the case of the Mexica, the obvious target is Hernán Cortés, who
landed near what is now the city of Veracruz on April 22, 1519. An astute politician,
Cortés studied the Triple Alliance with a view to dismembering it. The empire, he
quickly understood, was anything but unified. Like Tawantinsuyu, it was a patchwork of
satrapies rather than a unified state; indeed, several large groups within the Alliance had
managed to hang on to their independence despite being surrounded by hostile forces.
Although the empire left the original elites of conquered lands in place, it humiliated
them. The people, forced to disgorge ever-increasing tribute to Tenochtitlan, were
resentful and bitter. Cortés divined the discontent beneath the Alliance’s martial display
and would later benefit from it.
Marching inland from the sea, the Spanish at first fought repeatedly with
Tlaxcala, a confederation of four small kingdoms that had maintained its independence
despite repeated Alliance incursions. Thanks to their guns, horses, and steel blades, the
foreigners won every battle, even with Tlaxcala’s huge numerical advantage. But
Cortés’s force shrank with every fight. He was on the verge of losing everything when
the four Tlaxcala kings abruptly reversed course. Concluding from the results of their
battles that they could wipe out the Europeans, though at great cost, the Indian leaders
offered what seemed a win-win deal: they would stop attacking Cortés, sparing his life,
the lives of the surviving Spaniards, and those of many Indians, if he in return would join
with Tlaxcala in a united assault on the hated Triple Alliance. To seal the partnership, one
of the four kings—Tlaxcala’s main military leader—betrothed his daughter to Pedro de
Alvarado, Cortés’s second-in-command. Mounted on their strange, monstrous beasts, the
Spanish rode at the forefront of an army of perhaps twenty thousand Tlaxcalans. In
November 1519, they entered Tenochtitlan, brushing by the objections of the startled and
indecisive tlatoani, the famous Motecuhzoma (pronounced a bit like Mo-tayk-SZU-ma;
he is better known, inaccurately, as Montezuma).
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TRIPLE ALLIANCE, 1519 A.D.
Tenochtitlan dazzled its invaders—it was bigger than Paris, Europe’s greatest
metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like yokels at the wide streets, ornately carved
buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. Boats flitted like
butterflies around the three grand causeways that linked Tenochtitlan to the mainland.
Long aqueducts conveyed water from the distant mountains across the lake and into the
city. Even more astounding than the great temples and immense banners and colorful
promenades were the botanical gardens—none existed in Europe. The same novelty
attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets
that weren’t ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never conceived of such a
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thing.)
And the whole of this wealth and power, Cortés subsequently explained to the
Spanish king, flowed into the hands of Motecuhzoma.
Can there be anything more magnificent than that this barbarian lord should have
all the things to be found under the heavens in his domain, fashioned in gold and silver
and jewel and feathers? And so realistic in gold and silver that no smith in the world
could have done better? And in jewels so fine that it is impossible to imagine with what
instruments they were cut so perfectly?…In Spain there is nothing to compare with it.
Dazzled as he was, Cortés was also aware that with a single command
Motecuhzoma could order his army “to obliterate all memory of us.” The Spaniards
counteracted this threat by inventing a pretext to seize the tlatoani in his own palace,
making him first their captive and then their puppet.
In both Europe and Mesoamerica kings ruled by the dispensation of the heavens.
The Mexica reacted to the sacrilegious abduction of their leader with the same baffled
horror with which Europeans later reacted to Cromwell’s execution of Charles I in 1649.
Not wanting to act in a way that could result in Motecuhzoma’s death, the Mexica took
seven months to mount a counterattack. Fearing the worst, the debased tlatoani made a
begging public appearance on behalf of the Spanish. He soon died, either murdered by
the Spaniards (according to Mexica accounts) or slain by his own countrymen (as
Spanish chronicles tell it). Soon after came the long-delayed assault. Under the leadership
of a vigorous new tlatoani, Cuitlahuac, the Indians forced the invaders into narrow alleys
where horses were of little advantage. Under a pitiless hail of spears, darts, and arrows,
Cortés and his men retreated down the long causeways that linked the island city to the
mainland. In a single brutal night the Mexica utterly vanquished Cortés, killing
three-quarters of his men. Although the Alliance destroyed the causeways in front of the
Spaniards, the remnants of the invaders were able to cross the gaps because they were so
choked with the dead that the men could walk on the bodies of their countrymen. Because
the Mexica did not view the goal of warfare as wiping out enemies to the last man, they
did not hunt down the last Spaniards. A costly mistake: Cortés was among the escapees.
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An enormous, opulent city of canals and (mostly) artificial islands in the middle
of a great mountain lake, the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan stunned the conquistadors
when they first saw it. This reconstruction, a mural by the artist Miguel Covarrubias, in
Mexico City’s great archaeology museum, underplays the busyness of the city;
eyewitness accounts report that clouds of boats darted around its edges and through its
canals.
A man of unfathomable determination, Cortés never thought of giving up. He
persuaded several other vassal states to join his anti-Alliance alliance with Tlaxcala.
Negotiating furiously, he assembled a force of as many as 200,000 men and built thirteen
big ships in an audacious plan to assault Tenochtitlan from the water. He followed this
plan and ever after has been identified by history as the city’s conqueror. But all of his
bold resolve would have come to nothing without the vast indigenous army whose
leaders believed they could use the Spanish presence to catalyze the destruction of the
Triple Alliance. And even this enormous force might not have overcome the empire if
while Cortés was building his ships Tenochtitlan had not been swept by smallpox in the
same pandemic that later wiped out Tawantinsuyu. Without any apparent volition by
Cortés, the great city lost at least a third of its population to the epidemic, including
Cuitlahuac.
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Sixteenth-century Mexica drawings of smallpox, the disease that destroyed the
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empire by crippling the defenders of Tenochtitlan in the battle against Cortés and his
native allies. “An epidemic broke out, a sickness of pustules,” begins the account in
Bernardino de Sahagún’s General History of the Things of New Spain (ca. 1575, in James
Lockhart’s translation). “Large bumps spread on people, some were entirely covered.
They spread everywhere, on the face, the head, the chest, etc…. [Victims] could no
longer walk about, but lay in their dwellings and sleeping places, no longer able to move
or stir. They were unable to change position, to stretch out on their sides or face down, or
raise their heads…. The pustules that covered people caused great desolation; very many
people died of them, and many just starved to death; starvation reigned, and no one took
care of others any longer.” The drawing at left, from a sixteenth-century codex, is a
winter-count-like depiction of a year dominated by smallpox; two men lie dying or dead,
their bodies spotted with pustules. The drawing below, from the General History, shows
cries of pain escaping from victims’ lips.
When Cortés and his Indian allies finally attacked, the Mexica resisted so fiercely
despite their weakness that the siege has often been described as the costliest battle in
history—casualty estimates range up to 100,000. Absent smallpox, it seems likely that
Cortés would have lost. In the event, he was able to take the city only by systematically
destroying it. The Alliance capitulated on August 21, 1521. It was the end of an imperial
tradition that dated back to Teotihuacan a millennium before.
Cortés was directly responsible for much of the carnage in Tenochtitlan, but the
war was only a small part of a larger catastrophe for which blame is harder to assign.
When Cortés landed, according to the Berkeley researchers Cook and Borah, 25.2 million
people lived in central Mexico, an area of about 200,000 square miles. After Cortés, the
population of the entire region collapsed. By 1620–25, it was 730,000, “approximately 3
percent of its size at the time that he first landed.” Cook and Borah calculated that the
area did not recover its fifteenth-century population until the late 1960s.
From Bartolomé de Las Casas on, Europeans have known that their arrival
brought about a catastrophe for Native Americans. “We, Christians, have destroyed so
many kingdoms,” reflected Pedro Cieza de León, the traveler in postconquest Peru. “For
wherever the Spaniards have passed, conquering and discovering, it is as though a fire
had gone, destroying everything in its path.” And since Las Casas historians, clerics, and
political activists have debated whether Europeans and their descendants in the Americas
are morally culpable for the enormous Indian losses. Indeed, some writers have employed
the loaded term “holocaust” to describe the contact and its aftermath. Following in its
train, inevitably, has come an even more potent label: genocide.
Europe’s defenders argue that the mass deaths cannot be described as genocide.
The epidemics often were not even known to Europeans, still less deliberately caused by
them. For that reason, they fall into a different moral class than the Jewish Holocaust,
which was a state policy of mass murder. “Very probably the greatest demographic
disaster in history, the depopulation of the New World, for all its terror and death, was
largely an unintended tragedy,” wrote Steven Katz in his monumental Holocaust in
Historical Context. The wave of Indian deaths, in his view, was “a tragedy that occurred
despite the sincere and indisputable desire of the Europeans to keep the Indian population
alive.”
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Berkeley researchers Cook and Borah spent decades reconstructing the population
of the former Triple Alliance realm in the wake of the Spanish conquest. By combining
colonial-era data from many sources, the two men estimated that the number of people in
the region fell from 25.2 million in 1518, just before Cortés arrived, to about 700,000 in
1623—a 97 percent drop in little more than a century. (Each marked date is one for
which they presented a population estimate.) Using parish records, Mexican demographer
Elsa Malvido calculated the sequence of epidemics in the region, portions of which are
shown here. Dates are approximate, because epidemics would last several years. The
identification of some diseases is uncertain as well; for example, sixteenth-century
Spaniards lumped together what today are seen as distinct maladies under the rubric
“plague.” In addition, native populations were repeatedly struck by “cocoliztli,” a disease
the Spanish did not know but that scientists have suggested might be a rat-borne
hantavirus—spread, in part, by the postconquest collapse of Indian sanitation measures.
Both reconstructions are tentative, but the combined picture of catastrophic depopulation
has convinced most researchers in the field.
Katz overstates his case. True, the conquistadors did not want the Indians to die
off en masse. But that desire did not stem from humanitarian motives. Instead, the
Spanish wanted native peoples to use as a source of forced labor. In fact, the Indian
deaths were such a severe financial blow to the colonies that they led, according to
Borah, to an “economic depression” that lasted “more than a century.” To resupply
themselves with labor, the Spaniards began importing slaves from Africa.
Later on, some of the newcomers indeed campaigned in favor of eradicating
natives. The poet-physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., for instance, regarded the Indian
as but “a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood.” To the “problem of his relation
to the white race,” Holmes said, there was one solution: “extermination.” Following such
impulses, a few Spanish—and a few French, Portuguese, and British—deliberately
spread disease. Many more treated Indians cruelly, murderously so, killing countless
thousands. But the pain and death caused from the deliberate epidemics, lethal cruelty,
and egregious racism pale in comparison to those caused by the great waves of disease, a
means of subjugation that the Europeans could not control and in many cases did not
know they had. How can they be morally culpable for it?
Not so fast, say the activists. Europeans may not have known about microbes, but
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they thoroughly understood infectious disease. Almost 150 years before Columbus set
sail, a Tartar army besieged the Genoese city of Kaffa. Then the Black Death visited. To
the defenders’ joy, their attackers began dying off. But triumph turned to terror when the
Tartar khan catapulted the dead bodies of his men over the city walls, deliberately
creating an epidemic inside. The Genoese fled Kaffa, leaving it open to the Tartars. But
they did not run away fast enough; their ships spread the disease to every port they
visited.
Coming from places that had suffered many such experiences, Europeans fully
grasped the potential consequences of smallpox. “And what was their collective response
to this understanding?” asked Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the
University of Colorado at Boulder.
Did they recoil in horror and say, “Wait a minute, we’ve got to halt the process, or
at least slow it down until we can get a handle on how to prevent these effects”? Nope.
Their response pretty much across-the-board was to accelerate their rate of arrival, and to
spread out as much as was humanly possible.
But this, too, overstates the case. Neither European nor Indian had a secular
understanding of disease. “Sickness was the physical manifestation of the will of God,”
Robert Crease, a philosopher of science at the State University of New York at Stony
Brook, told me. “You could pass it on to someone, but doing that was like passing on
evil, or bad luck, or a bad spirit—the transmission also reflected God’s will.” The
conquistadors knew the potential impact of disease, but its actual impact, which they
could not control, was in the hands of God.
The Mexica agreed. In all the indigenous accounts of the conquest and its
aftermath, the anthropologist J. Jorge Klor de Alva observed, the Mexica lament their
losses, but, “the Spaniards are rarely judged in moral terms, and Cortés is only
sporadically considered a villain. It seems to be commonly understood”—at least by this
bleakly philosophical, imperially minded group—“that the Spaniards did what any other
group would have done or would have been expected to do if the opportunity had
existed.”
Famously, the conquistador Bernal Díaz de Castillo ticked off the reasons he and
others joined Cortés: “to serve God and His Majesty [the king of Spain], to give light to
those who were in darkness, and to grow rich, as all men desire to do.” In Díaz’s list,
spiritual and material motivations were equally important. Cortés was constantly
preoccupied by the search for gold, but he also had to be restrained by the priests
accompanying him from promulgating the Gospel in circumstances sure to anger native
leaders. After the destruction of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish court and intellectual elite were
convulsed with argument for a century about whether the conversions were worth the
suffering inflicted. Many believed that even if Indians died soon after conversion, good
could still occur. “Christianity is not about getting healthy, it’s about getting saved,”
Crease said, summarizing. Today few Christians would endorse this argument, but that
doesn’t make it any easier to assign the correct degree of blame to their ancestors.
In an editorial about Black’s analysis of Indian HLA profiles, Jean-Claude
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Salomon, a medical researcher at France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique,
asked if the likely inevitability of native deaths could “reduce the historical guilt of
Europeans.” In a sense it does, Salomon wrote. But it did not let the invaders off the
hook—they caused huge numbers of deaths, and knew that they had done it. “Those who
carried the microbes across the Atlantic were responsible, but not guilty,” Salomon
concluded. Guilt is not readily passed down the generations, but responsibility can be. A
first step toward satisfying that responsibility for Europeans and their descendants in
North and South America would be to treat indigenous people today with
respect—something that, alas, cannot yet be taken for granted. Recognizing and obeying
past treaties wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.
ISN’T THIS ALL JUST REVISIONISM?
Yes, of course—except that it’s more like re-revisionism. The first European
adventurers in the Western Hemisphere did not make careful population counts, but they
repeatedly described indigenous America as a crowded, jostling place—“a beehive of
people,” as Las Casas put it in 1542. To Las Casas, the Americas seemed so thick with
people “that it looked as if God has placed all of or the greater part of the entire human
race in these countries.”
So far as is known, Las Casas never tried to enumerate the original native
population. But he did try to calculate how many died from Spanish disease and brutality.
In Las Casas’s “sure, truthful estimate,” his countrymen in the first five decades after
Columbus wiped out “more than twelve million souls, men and women and children; and
in truth I believe, without trying to deceive myself, that it was more than fifteen million.”
Twenty years later, he raised his estimate of Indian deaths—and hence of the initial
population—to forty million.
Las Casas’s successors usually shared his ideas—the eighteenth-century Jesuit
Francisco Javier Clavijero, for example, asserted that the pre-Columbian population of
Mexico alone was thirty million. But gradually a note of doubt crept in. To most
historians, the colonial accounts came to seem exaggerated, though exactly why was not
often explained. (“Sixteenth-century Europeans,” Cook and Borah dryly remarked, “did
indeed know how to count.”) Especially in North America, historians’ guesses at native
numbers kept slipping down. By the 1920s they had dwindled to forty or fifty million in
the entire hemisphere—about the number that Las Casas believed had died in
Mesoamerica alone. Twenty years after that, the estimates had declined by another factor
of five.
Today the picture has reversed. The High Counters seem to be winning the
argument, at least for now. No definitive data exist, but the majority of the extant
evidentiary scraps indicate it. “Most of the arrows point in that direction,” Denevan said
to me. Zambardino, the computer scientist who decried the margin of error in these
estimates, noted that even an extremely conservative extrapolation of known figures
would still project a precontact population in central Mexico alone of five to ten million,
“a very high population, not only in terms of the sixteenth century, but indeed on any
terms.” Even Henige, of Numbers from Nowhere, is no Low Counter. In Numbers from
Nowhere, he argues that “perhaps 40 million throughout the Western Hemisphere” is a
“not unreasonable” figure—putting him at the low end of the High Counters, but a High
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Counter nonetheless. Indeed, it is the same figure provided by Las Casas, patron saint of
High Counters, foremost among the old Spanish sources whose estimates Henige spends
many pages discounting.
To Fenn, the smallpox historian, the squabble over the number of deaths and the
degree of blame obscures something more important. In the long run, Fenn says, the
consequential finding of the new scholarship is not that many people died but that many
people lived. The Americas were filled with an enthusiastically diverse assortment of
peoples who had knocked about the continents for millennia. “We are talking about
enormous numbers of people,” she told me. “You have to wonder, Who were all these
people? And what were they doing?”
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PART TWO
Very Old Bones
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Pleistocene Wars
POSSIBLY A VERY ODD HAPLOGROUP
The last time I spoke with Sérgio D. J. Pena, he was hunting for ancient Indians in
modern blood. The blood was sealed into thin, rodlike vials in Pena’s laboratory at the
Federal University of Minas Gerais, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third-largest city. To
anyone who has seen a molecular biology lab on the television news, the racks of
refrigerating tanks, whirling DNA extractors, and gene-sequencing machines in Pena’s
lab would look familiar. But what Pena was doing with them would not. One way to
describe Pena’s goal would be to say that he was trying to bring back a people who
vanished thousands of years ago. Another would be to say that he was wrestling with a
scientific puzzle that had resisted resolution since 1840.
In that year Peter Wilhelm Lund, a Danish botanist, found thirty skeletons in
caves twenty miles north of Belo Horizonte. The caves were named Lagoa Santa, after a
nearby village. Inside them were a jumble of remains from people and big, extinct beasts.
If the human and animal bones were from the same time period, as their proximity
suggested, the implication was that people had been living in the Americas many
thousands of years ago, much longer than most scientists then believed. Who were these
ancient hunters? Regarding Europe as the world’s intellectual capital, the intrigued Lund
sent most of the skeletons to a museum in his native Copenhagen. He was certain that
researchers there would quickly study and identify them. Instead the bones remained in
boxes, rarely disturbed, for more than a century.
Scientists finally examined the Lagoa Santa skeletons in the 1960s. Laboratory
tests showed that the bones could be fifteen thousand years old—possibly the oldest
human remains in the Western Hemisphere. Lund had noted the skulls’ heavy brows,
which are rare in Native Americans. The new measurements confirmed that oddity and
suggested that these people were in many ways physically quite distinct from modern
Indians, which indicated, at least to some Brazilian archaeologists, that the Lagoa Santa
people could not have been the ancestors of today’s native populations. Instead the
earliest inhabitants of the Americas must have been some other kind of people.
North American researchers tended to scoff at the notion that some mysterious
non-Indians had lived fifteen thousand years ago in the heart of Brazil, but South
Americans, Pena among them, were less dismissive. Pena had studied and worked for
twelve years overseas, mainly in Canada and the United States. He returned in 1982 to
Belo Horizonte, a surging, industrial city in the nation’s east-central highlands. In
Brazilian terms, it was like abandoning a glamorous expatriate life in Paris to come back
to Chicago. Pena had become interested while abroad in using genetics as a historical
tool—studying family trees and migrations by examining DNA. At Belo Horizonte, he
joined the university faculty and founded, on the side, Brazil’s first DNA-fingerprinting
company, providing paternity tests for families and forensic studies for the police. He
taught, researched, published in prestigious U.S. and European journals, and ran his
company. In time he became intrigued by the Lagoa Santa skeletons.
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The most straightforward way to discover whether the Lagoa Santa people were
related to modern Indians, Pena decided, would be to compare DNA from their skeletons
with DNA from living Indians. In 1999 his team tried to extract DNA from Lagoa Santa
bones. When the DNA turned out to be unusable, Pena came up with a second, more
unorthodox approach: he decided to look for Lagoa Santa DNA in the Botocudo.
The Botocudo were an indigenous group that lived a few hundred miles north of
what is now Rio de Janeiro. (The name comes from botoque, the derogatory Portuguese
term for the big wooden discs that the Botocudo inserted in their lower lips and earlobes,
distending them outward.) Although apparently never numerous, they resisted conquest
so successfully that in 1801 the Portuguese colonial government formally launched a
“just war against the cannibalistic Botocudo.” There followed a century of intermittent
strife, which slowly drove the Botocudo to extinction.
With their slightly bulging brows, deepset eyes, and square jaws, the Botocudo
were phenotypically different (that is, different in appearance) from their neighbors—a
difference comparable to the difference between West Africans and Scandinavians. More
important, some Brazilian scientists believe, the Botocudo were phenotypically similar to
the Lagoa Santa people. If the similarity was due to a genetic connection—that is, if the
Botocudo were a remnant of an early non-Indian population at Lagoa Santa—studying
Botocudo DNA should provide clues to the genetic makeup of the earliest Americans. To
discover whether that genetic connection existed, Pena would first have to obtain some
Botocudo DNA. This requirement would have seemed to doom the enterprise, because
the Botocudo no longer exist. But Pena had an idea—innovative or preposterous,
depending on the point of view—of how one might find some Botocudo DNA anyway.
All human beings have two genomes. The first is the genome of the DNA in
chromosomes, the genome of the famous human genome project, which proclaimed its
success with great fanfare in 2000. The second and much smaller genome is of the DNA
in mitochondria; it was mapped, to little public notice, in 1981. Mitochondria are minute,
bean-shaped objects, hundreds of which bob about like so much flotsam in the warm,
salty envelope of the cell. The body’s chemical plants, they gulp in oxygen and release
the energy-rich molecules that power life. Mitochondria are widely believed to descend
from bacteria that long ago somehow became incorporated into one of our evolutionary
ancestors. They replicate themselves independently of the rest of the cell, without using
its DNA. To accomplish this, they have their own genome, a tiny thing with fewer than
fifty genes, left over from their former existence as free-floating bacteria. Because sperm
cells are basically devoid of mitochondria, almost all of an embryo’s mitochondria come
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from the egg. Children’s mitochondria are thus in essence identical to their mother’s.
More than that, every woman’s mitochondrial DNA is identical not only to her
mother’s mitochondrial DNA, but to that of her mother’s mother’s mitochondrial DNA,
and her mother’s mother’s mother’s mitochondrial DNA, and so on down the line for
many generations. The same is not true for men. Because fathers don’t contribute
mitochondrial DNA to the embryo, the succession occurs only through the female line.
In the late 1970s several scientists realized that an ethnic group’s mitochondrial
DNA could provide clues to its ancestry. Their reasoning was complex in detail, but
simple in principle. People with similar mitochondria have, in the jargon, the same
“haplogroup.” If two ethnic groups share the same haplogroup, it is molecular proof that
the two groups are related; their members belong to the same female line. In 1990 a team
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led by Douglas C. Wallace, now at the University of California at Irvine, discovered that
just four mitochondrial haplogroups account for 96.9 percent of Native
Americans—another example of Indians’ genetic homogeneity, but one without any
known negative (or positive) consequences. Three of the four Indian haplogroups are
common in southern Siberia. Given the inheritance rules for mitochondrial DNA, the
conclusion that Indians and Siberians share common ancestry seems, to geneticists,
inescapable.
Wallace’s research gave Pena a target to shoot at. Even as the Brazilian
government was wiping out the Botocudos, some Brazilian men of European descent
were marrying Botocudo women. Generations later, the female descendants of those
unions should still have mitochondria identical to the mitochondria of their female
Botocudo ancestors. In other words, Pena might be able to find ancient American DNA
hidden in Brazil’s European population.
Pena had blood samples from people who believed their grandparents or
great-grandparents were Indians and who had lived in Botocudo territory. “I’m looking
for, possibly, a very odd haplogroup,” he told me. “One that is not clearly indigenous or
clearly European.” If such a haplogroup turned up in Pena’s assays, it could write a new
chapter in the early history of Native Americans. He expected to be searching for a while,
and anything he found would need careful confirmation.
Since the sixteenth century, the origins of Native Americans have been an
intellectual puzzle.
*15 Countless amateur thinkers took a crack at the problem, as did
anthropologists and archaeologists when those disciplines were invented. The
professionals made no secret of their disdain for the amateurs, whom they regarded as
annoyances, cranks, or frauds. Unfortunately for the experts, in the 1920s and 1930s their
initial theories about the timing of Indians’ entrance into the Americas were proven
wrong, and in a way that allowed the crackpots to claim vindication. Thirty years later a
new generation of researchers put together a different theory of Native American origins
that gained general agreement. But in the 1980s and 1990s a gush of new information
about the first Americans came in from archaeological digs, anthropological laboratories,
molecular biology research units, and linguists’ computer models. The discoveries once
again fractured the consensus about the early American history, miring it in dispute. “It
really does seem sometimes that scientific principles are going out the window,” the
archaeologist C. Vance Haynes said to me, unhappily. “If you listen to [the dissenting
researchers], they want to throw away everything we’ve established.”
Haynes was waxing rhetorical—the critics don’t want to jettison everything from
the past. But I could understand the reason for his dour tone. Again the experts were said
to have been proved wrong, opening a door that until recently was bolted against the
crackpots. A field that had seemed unified was split into warring camps. And projects
like Pena’s, which not long ago would have seemed marginal, even nutty, now might
have to be taken seriously.
In another sense, though, Haynes’s unhappy view seemed off the mark. The
rekindled dispute over Indian origins has tended to mask a greater archaeological
accomplishment: the enormous recent accumulation of knowledge about the American
past. In almost every case, Indian societies have been revealed to be older, grander, and
more complex than was thought possible even twenty years ago. Archaeologists not only
have pushed back the date for humanity’s entrance into the Americas, they have learned
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that the first large-scale societies grew up earlier than had been believed—almost two
thousand years earlier, and in a different part of the hemisphere. And even those societies
that had seemed best understood, like the Maya, have been placed in new contexts on the
basis of new information.
At one point I asked Pena what he thought the reaction would be if he discovered
that ancient Indians were, in fact, not genetically related to modern Indians. He was
standing by a computer printer that was spewing out graphs and charts, the results of
another DNA comparison. “It will seem impossible to believe at first,” he said, flipping
through the printout. “But if it is true—and I am not saying that it is—people will
ultimately accept it, just like all the other impossible ideas they’ve had to accept.”
LOST TRIBES
So various were the peoples of the Americas that continent-wide generalizations
are risky to the point of folly. Nonetheless, one can say that for the most part the initial
Indian-European encounter was less of an intellectual shock to Indians than to Europeans.
Indians were surprised when strange-looking people appeared on their shores, but unlike
Europeans they were not surprised that such strange people existed.
Many natives, seeking to categorize the newcomers, were open to the possibility
that they might belong to the realm of the supernatural. They often approached visitors as
if they might be deities, possibly calculating, in the spirit of Pascal’s wager, that the
downside of an erroneous attribution of celestial power was minimal. The Taino Indians,
Columbus reported after his first voyage, “firmly believed that I, with my ships and men,
came from the heavens…. Wherever I went, [they] ran from house to house, and to the
towns around, crying out, ‘Come! come! and see the men from the heavens!’” On
Columbus’s later voyages, his crew happily accepted godhood—until the Taino began
empirically testing their divinity by forcing their heads underwater for long periods to see
if the Spanish were, as gods should be, immortal.
Motecuhzoma, according to many scholarly texts, believed that Cortés was the
god-hero Quetzalcoatl returning home, in fulfillment of a prophecy. What historian
Barbara Tuchman called the emperor’s “wooden-headedness, in the special variety of
religious mania” is often said to be why he didn’t order his army to wipe out the
Spaniards immediately. But the anthropologist Matthew Restall has noted that none of
the conquistadors’ writings mention this supposed apotheosis, not even Cortés’s lengthy
memos to the Spanish king, which go into detail about every other wonderful thing he
did. Instead the Quetzalcoatl story first appears decades later. True, the Mexica
apparently did call the Spaniards teteo, a term referring both to gods and to powerful,
privileged people. The ambiguity captures the indigenous attitude toward the hairy, oddly
dressed strangers on their shores: recognition that their presence was important, plus a
willingness to believe that such unusual people might have qualities unlike those of
ordinary men and women.
Similarly, groups like the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Haudenosaunee in
eastern North America also thought at first that Europeans might have supernatural
qualities. But this was because Indians north and south regarded Europeans as human
beings exactly like themselves. In their view of the world, certain men and women, given
the right circumstances, could wield more-than-human powers. If the Wampanoag and
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Mexica had shamans who could magically inflict sickness, why couldn’t the British?
(The Europeans, who themselves believed that people could become witches and
magically spread disease, were hardly going to argue.)
As a rule, Indians were theologically prepared for the existence of Europeans. In
Choctaw lore, for example, the Creator breathed life into not one but many primeval pairs
of human beings scattered all over the earth. It could not have been terribly surprising to
Choctaw thinkers that the descendants of one pair should show up in the territory of
another. Similarly, the Zuni took the existence of Spaniards in stride, though not their
actions. To the Zuni, whose accounts of their origins and early history are as minutely
annotated as those in the Hebrew Bible, all humankind arose from a small band that faded
into existence in a small, dark, womb-like lower world. The sun took pity on these
bewildered souls, gave them maize to eat, and distributed them across the surface of the
earth. The encounter with Europeans was thus a meeting of long-separated cousins.
Contact with Indians caused Europeans considerably more consternation.
Columbus went to his grave convinced that he had landed on the shores of Asia, near
India. The inhabitants of this previously unseen land were therefore Asians—hence the
unfortunate name “Indians.” As his successors discovered that the Americas were not
part of Asia, Indians became a dire anthropogonical problem. According to Genesis, all
human beings and animals perished in the Flood except those on Noah’s ark, which
landed “upon the mountains of Ararat,” thought to be in eastern Turkey. How, then, was
it possible for humans and animals to have crossed the immense Pacific? Did the
existence of Indians negate the Bible, and Christianity with it?
Among the first to grapple directly with this question was the Jesuit educator José
de Acosta, who spent a quarter century in New Spain. Any explanation of Indians’
origins, he wrote in 1590, “cannot contradict Holy Writ, which clearly teaches that all
men descend from Adam.” Because Adam had lived in the Middle East, Acosta was
“forced” to conclude “that the men of the Indies traveled there from Europe or Asia.” For
this to be possible, the Americas and Asia “must join somewhere.”
If this is true, as indeed it appears to me to be,…we would have to say that they
crossed not by sailing on the sea, but by walking on land. And they followed this way
quite unthinkingly, changing places and lands little by little, with some of them settling in
the lands already discovered and others seeking new ones. [Emphasis added]
Acosta’s hypothesis was in basic form widely accepted for centuries. For his
successors, in fact, the main task was not to discover whether Indians’ ancestors had
walked over from Eurasia, but which Europeans or Asians had done the walking.
Enthusiasts proposed a dozen groups as the ancestral stock: Phoenicians, Basques,
Chinese, Scythians, Romans, Africans, “Hindoos,” ancient Greeks, ancient Assyrians,
ancient Egyptians, the inhabitants of Atlantis, even straying bands of Welsh. But the most
widely accepted candidates were the Lost Tribes of Israel.
The story of the Lost Tribes is revealed mainly in the Second Book of Kings of
the Old Testament and the apocryphal Second (or Fourth, depending on the type of Bible)
Book of Esdras. At that time, according to scripture, the Hebrew tribes had split into two
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adjacent confederations, the southern kingdom of Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem, and
the northern kingdom of Israel, with its capital in Samaria. After the southern tribes took
to behaving sinfully, divine retribution came in the form of the Assyrian king
Shalmaneser V, who overran Israel and exiled its ten constituent tribes to Mesopotamia
(today’s Syria and Iraq). Now repenting of their wickedness, the Bible explains, the tribes
resolved to “go to a distant land never yet inhabited by man, and there at last to be
obedient to their laws.” True to their word, they walked away and were never seen again.
Because the Book of Ezekiel prophesizes that in the final days God “will take the
children of Israel from among the heathen…and bring them into their own land,”
Christian scholars believed that the Israelites’ descendants—Ezekiel’s “children of
Israel”—must still be living in some remote place, waiting to be taken back to their
homeland. Identifying Indians as these “lost tribes” solved two puzzles at once: where the
Israelites had gone, and the origins of Native Americans.
Acosta weighed the Indians-as-Jews theory but eventually dismissed it because
Indians were not circumcised. Besides, he blithely explained, Jews were cowardly and
greedy, and Indians were not. Others did not find his refutation convincing. The Lost
Tribes theory was endorsed by authorities from Bartolomé de Las Casas to William Penn,
founder of Pennsylvania, and the famed minister Cotton Mather. (In a variant, the Book
of Mormon argued that some Indians were descended from Israelites though not
necessarily the Lost Tribes.) In 1650 James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, calculated
from Old Testament genealogical data that God created the universe on Sunday, October
23, 4004 B.C. So august was Ussher’s reputation, wrote historian Andrew Dickson
White, that “his dates were inserted in the margins of the authorized version of the
English Bible, and were soon practically regarded as equally inspired with the sacred text
itself.” According to Ussher’s chronology, the Lost Tribes left Israel in 721 B.C.
Presumably they began walking to the Americas soon thereafter. Even allowing for a
slow passage, the Israelites must have arrived by around 500 B.C. When Columbus
landed, the Americas therefore had been settled for barely two thousand years.
The Lost Tribes theory held sway until the nineteenth century, when it was
challenged by events. As Lund had in Brazil, British scientists discovered some
strange-looking human skeletons jumbled up with the skeletons of extinct Pleistocene
mammals. The find, quickly duplicated in France, caused a sensation. To supporters of
Darwin’s recently published theory of evolution, the find proved that the ancestors of
modern humans had lived during the Ice Ages, tens or hundreds of thousands of years
ago. Others attacked this conclusion, and the skeletons became one of the casus belli of
the evolution wars. Indirectly, the discovery also stimulated argument about the
settlement of the Americas. Evolutionists believed that the Eastern and Western
Hemispheres had developed in concert. If early humans had inhabited Europe during the
Ice Ages, they must also have lived in the Americas at the same time. Indians must
therefore have arrived before 500 B.C. Ussher’s chronology and the Lost Tribes scenario
were wrong.
The nineteenth century was the heyday of amateur science. In the United States as
in Europe, many of Darwin’s most ardent backers were successful tradespeople whose
hobby was butterfly or beetle collecting. When these amateurs heard that the ancestors of
Indians must have come to the Americas thousands of years ago, a surprising number of
them decided to hunt for the evidence that would prove it.
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“BLIND LEADERS OF THE BLIND”
In 1872 one such seeker—Charles Abbott, a New Jersey physician—found stone
arrowheads, scrapers, and axheads on his farm in the Delaware Valley. Because the
artifacts were crudely made, Abbott believed that they must have been fashioned not by
historical Indians but by some earlier, “ruder” group, modern Indians’ long-ago
ancestors. He consulted a Harvard geologist, who told him that the gravel around the
finds was ten thousand years old, which Abbott regarded as proof that Pleistocene Man
had lived in New Jersey at least that far in the past. Indeed, he argued, Pleistocene Man
had lived in New Jersey for so many millennia that he had probably evolved there. If
modern Indians had migrated from Asia, Abbott said, they must have “driven away”
these original inhabitants. Egged on by his proselytizing, other weekend bone hunters
soon found similar sites with similar crude artifacts. By 1890 amateur scientists claimed
to have found traces of Pleistocene Americans in New Jersey, Indiana, Ohio, and the
suburbs of Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
Unsurprisingly, Christian leaders rejected Abbott’s claims, which (to repeat)
contradicted both Ussher’s chronology and the theologically convenient Lost Tribes
theory. More puzzling, at least to contemporary eyes, was the equally vehement
objections voiced by professional archaeologists and anthropologists, especially those at
the Smithsonian Institution, which had established a Bureau of American Ethnology in
1879. According to David J. Meltzer, a Southern Methodist University archaeologist who
has written extensively about the history of his field, the bureau’s founders were
determined to set the new disciplines on a proper scientific footing. Among other things,
this meant rooting out pseudoscience. The bureau dispatched William Henry Holmes to
scrutinize the case for Pleistocene proto-Indians.
C. C. Abbott
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William Henry Holmes
Holmes was a rigorous, orderly man with, Meltzer told me, “no sense of humor
whatsoever.” Although Holmes in no way believed that Indians were descended from the
Lost Tribes, he was also unwilling to believe that Indians or anyone else had inhabited
the Americas as far back as the Ice Ages. His determined skepticism on this issue is hard
to fathom. True, many of the ancient skeletons in Europe were strikingly different from
those of contemporary humans—in fact, they were Neanderthals, a different subspecies
or species from modern humans—whereas all the Indian skeletons that archaeologists
had seen thus far looked anatomically modern. But why did this lead Holmes to assume
that Indians must have migrated to the Americas in the recent past, a view springing from
biblical chronology? Underlying his actions may have been bureau researchers’ distaste
for “relic hunters” like Abbott, whom they viewed as publicity-seeking quacks.
Holmes methodically inspected half a dozen purported Ice Age sites, including
Abbott’s farm. In each case, he dismissed the “ancient artifacts” as much more
recent—the broken pieces and cast-asides of Indian workshops from the colonial era. In
Holmes’s sardonic summary, “Two hundred years of aboriginal misfortune and Quaker
inattention and neglect”—this was a shot at Abbott, a Quaker—had transformed ordinary
refuse that was at most a few centuries old into a “scheme of cultural evolution that spans
ten thousand years.”
The Bureau of American Ethnology worked closely with the United States
Geological Survey, an independent federal agency founded at the same time. Like
Holmes, Geological Survey geologist W. J. McGee believed it was his duty to protect the
temple of Science from profanation by incompetent and overimaginative amateurs.
Anthropology, he lamented, “is particularly attractive to humankind, and for this reason
the untrained are constantly venturing upon its purlieus; and since each heedless
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adventurer leads a rabble of followers, it behooves those who have at heart the good of
the science…to bell the blind leaders of the blind.”
To McGee, one of the worst of these “heedless adventurers” was Abbott, whose
devotion to his purported Pleistocene Indians seemed to McGee to exemplify the worst
kind of fanaticism. Abbott’s medical practice collapsed because patients disliked his
touchy disposition and crackpot sermons about ancient spear points. Forced to work as a
clerk in Trenton, New Jersey, a town he loathed, he hunted for evidence of Pleistocene
Indians during weekends on his farmstead. (In truth, the Abbott farm had a lot of
artifacts; it is now an official National Historic Landmark.) Bitterly resenting his
marginal position in the research world, he besieged scientific journals with angry
denunciations of Holmes and McGee, explanations of his own theories, and
investigations into the intelligence of fish (“that this class of animals is more ‘knowing’
than is generally believed is, I hold, unquestionable”), birds (“a high degree of
intelligence”), and snakes (“neither among the scanty early references to the serpents
found in New Jersey, nor in more recent herpetological literature, are there to be found
statements that bear directly upon the subject of the intelligence of snakes”).
Unsurprisingly, Abbott detested William Henry Holmes, W. J. McGee, and the
“scientific men of Washington” who were conspiring against the truth. “The stones are
inspected,” he wrote in one of the few doggerel poems ever published in Science,
And Holmes cries, “rejected,
They’re nothing but Indian chips.”
He glanced at the ground,
Truth, fancied he found,
And homeward to Washington skips….
So dear W.J.,
There is no more to say,
Because you’ll never agree
That anything’s truth,
But what issues, forsooth,
From Holmes or the brain of McGee.
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Abbott was thrilled when his associate Ernest Volk dug up a human femur deep in
the gravel of the farm. Volk had spent a decade searching for Ice Age humans in New
Jersey. Gloating that his new discovery was “the key to it all,” Volk sent the bone for
examination to a physical anthropologist named Aleš Hrdli ka. (The name,
approximately pronounced A-lesh Herd-lish-ka, was a legacy of his birth in Bohemia.)
Hrdli ka had seen the Neanderthal skeletons, which did not resemble those of modern
humans. Similarly, he believed, ancient Indian skeletons should also differ from those of
their descendants. Volk’s femur looked anatomically contemporary. But even if it had
looked different, Hrdli ka said, that wouldn’t be enough to prove that the ancestors of
Indians walked New Jersey thousands of years ago. Volk and Abbott would also have to
prove that the bone was old. Even if a bone looked just like a Neanderthal bone, it
couldn’t be classified as one if it had been found in modern construction debris. Only if
the archaeological context—the dirt and rock around the find—was established as ancient
could the bone be classified as ancient too.
In the next quarter century amateur bone hunters discovered dozens of what they
believed to be ancient skeletons in what they believed to be ancient sediments. One by
one Hrdli ka, who had moved to the Smithsonian and become the most eminent
physical anthropologist of his time, shot them down. The skeletons are completely
modern, he would say. And the sediments around them were too disturbed to ascertain
their age. People dig graves, he reminded the buffs. You should assume from the outset
that if you find a skeleton six feet deep in the earth that the bones are a lot newer than the
dirt around them.
Aleš Hrdli
ka
With his stern gaze, scowling moustache, and long, thick hair that swept straight
back from the forehead, Hrdli ka was the very image of celluloid-collar Authority. He
was an indefatigably industrious man who wrote some four hundred articles and books;
founded the American Journal of Physical Anthropology; forcefully edited it for
twenty-four years; and collected, inspected, and cataloged more than 32,000 skeletons
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from around the world, stuffing them into boxes at the Smithsonian. By temperament, he
was suspicious of anything that smacked of novelty and modishness. Alas, the list of
things that he dismissed as intellectual fads included female scientists, genetic analysis,
and the entire discipline of statistics—even such simple statistical measures as standard
deviations were notably absent from the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Hrdli ka regarded himself as the conscience of physical anthropology and made it his
business to set boundaries. So thoroughly did he discredit all purported findings of
ancient Indians that a later director of the Bureau of American Ethnology admitted that
for decades it was a career-killer for an archaeologist to claim to have “discovered
indications of a respectable antiquity for the Indian.”
In Europe, every “favorable cave” showed evidence “of some ancient man,” Hrdli
ka proclaimed in March 1928. And the evidence they found in those caves was “not a
single implement or whatnot,” but of artifacts in “such large numbers that already they
clog some of the museums in Europe.” Not in the Americas, though. “Where are any such
things in America?” he taunted the amateurs. “Where are Aleš the implements, the bones
of animals upon which these old men have fed?…Where is the explanation of all this?
What is the matter?”
FOLSOM AND THE GRAYBEARDS
Twenty years before Hrdli ka’s mockery, a flash flood tore a deep gully into a
ranch in the northeast corner of New Mexico, near the hamlet of Folsom. Afterward
ranch foreman George McJunkin checked the fences for damage. Walking along the new
gully, he spotted several huge bones projecting from its sides. Born a slave before the
Civil War, McJunkin had no formal education—he had only learned to read as an adult.
But he was an expert horseman, a self-taught violinist, and an amateur geologist,
astronomer, and natural historian. He instantly recognized that the bones did not belong
to any extant species and hence must be very old. Believing that his discovery was
important, he tried over the years to show the bones to local Folsomites. Most spurned his
entreaties. Eventually a white blacksmith in a nearby town came, saw, and got equally
excited. McJunkin died in 1922. Four years later, the blacksmith persuaded Jesse D.
Figgins, head of the Colorado Museum of Natural History, to send someone to Folsom.
Figgins wanted to display a fossil bison in his museum, especially if he could get
one of the big varieties that went extinct during the Pleistocene. When he received a
favorable report from Folsom, he dispatched a work crew to dig out the bones. Its
members quickly stumbled across two artifacts—not crude, Abbott-style arrowheads, but
elegantly crafted spear points. They also found that a piece from one of the spear points
was pressed into the dirt surrounding a bison bone. Since this type of mammal had last
existed thousands of years ago, the spear point and its owner must have been of
equivalent antiquity.
The spear points both intrigued and dismayed Figgins. His museum had
discovered evidence that the Americas had been inhabited during the Pleistocene, a major
scientific coup. But this also put Figgins, who knew little about archaeology, in the
crosshairs of Aleš Hrdli ka.
Early in 1927 Figgins took the spear points to Washington, D.C. He met both
Hrdli ka and Holmes, who, to Figgins’s relief, treated him courteously. Hrdli ka told
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Figgins that if more spear points turned up, he should not excavate them, because that
would make it difficult for others to view them in their archaeological and geological
context. Instead, he should leave them in the ground and ask the experts to supervise their
excavation.
Figgins regarded Hrdli ka’s words as a friendly suggestion. But according to
Meltzer, the Southern Methodist University anthropologist, the great man’s motives were
less charitable. Figgins had sent excavation teams to several areas in addition to Folsom,
and had also found implements in them. Encouraged by the increasing number of
discoveries, Figgins’s estimation of their import was growing almost daily. Indeed, he
was now claiming that the artifacts were half a million years old. Half a million years!
One can imagine Hrdli ka’s disgust—Homo sapiens itself wasn’t thought to be half a
million years old. By asking Figgins to unearth any new “discoveries” only in the
presence of the scientific elite, Hrdli ka hoped to eliminate the next round of quackery
before it could take hold.
In August 1927 Figgins’s team at Folsom came across a spear point stuck
between two bison ribs. He sent out telegrams. Three renowned scientists promptly
traveled to New Mexico and watched Figgins’s team brush away the dirt from the point
and extract it from the gully. All three agreed, as they quickly informed Hrdli ka, that
the discovery admitted only one possible explanation: thousands of years ago, a
Pleistocene hunter had speared a bison.
After that, Meltzer told me, “the whole forty-year battle was essentially over.
[One of three experts, A. V.] Kidder said, ‘This site is real,’ and that was it.” Another of
the experts, Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History in New York
City, took over the excavations, shouldering Figgins aside. After spending the next
summer at Folsom, he introduced the site to the world at a major scientific conference.
His speech did not even mention Figgins.
Hrdli ka issued his caustic “where are any such things” speech months after
learning about Folsom—a disingenuous act. But he never directly challenged the spear
points’ antiquity. Until his death in 1943, in fact, he avoided the subject of Folsom,
except to remark that the site wasn’t conclusive proof that the Americas were inhabited
during the Pleistocene. “He won every battle but lost the war,” Meltzer said. “Every one
of the sites that he discredited was, in fact, not from the Pleistocene. He was completely
right about them. And he was right to insist that Figgins excavate the Folsom points in
front of experts. But Abbott and the rest of the ‘nutcases’ were right that people came
much earlier to the Americas.”
THE CLOVIS CONSENSUS
Early in 1929, the Smithsonian received a letter from Ridgely Whiteman, a
nineteen-year-old in the village of Clovis, New Mexico, near the state border with Texas.
Whiteman had graduated from high school the previous summer and planned to make his
living as a carpenter and, he hoped, as an artist. Wandering in the basins south of Clovis,
he observed what looked like immense bones protruding from the dry, blue-gray clay.
Whiteman, who was part Indian, was fascinated by Indian lore and had been following
the archaeological excitement in Folsom, two hundred miles to the north. He sent a letter
to the Smithsonian, informing the staff that he, too, had found “extinct elephant bones”
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and that someone there should take a look. Surprisingly, the museum responded.
Paleontologist Charles Gilmore took the train to Clovis that summer.
Clovis is at the southern end of the Llano Estacado (the “Staked Plain”), fifty
thousand square miles of flat, almost featureless sand and scrub. Whiteman’s bones were
in Blackwater Draw, which during the Pleistocene served as a wide, shallow regional
drainage channel, a kind of long, slow-moving lake. As the Ice Ages ended, Blackwater
Draw slowly dried up. The continuous flow of water turned into isolated ponds. Game
animals congregated around the water, and hunters followed them there. By the time of
Gilmore’s visit, Blackwater Draw was an arid, almost vegetation-free jumble of sandy
drifts and faces of fractured caliche. In one of archaeology’s great missed opportunities,
Gilmore walked around the area for an hour, decided that it was of no interest, and took
the train back to Washington.
The thumbs-down response stupefied Whiteman, who had already turned up
dozens of fossils and artifacts there. On and off, he continued his efforts to attract
scholarly interest. In the summer of 1932 a local newspaper reporter put him into contact
with Edgar B. Howard, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, who had,
one of his assistants later wrote, a “driving mania” to discover a Folsom-like site of his
own. Howard had already spent three years combing the Southwest for ancient bones,
crawling into rattlesnake caves and taking a pickax to rock faces. Intrigued by
Whiteman’s curios, he asked if he could examine them that winter during his down time.
Howard took them back to Philadelphia but had no chance to inspect them. A few weeks
after his return a construction project near Clovis unearthed more huge bones. Locals
gleefully took them away—one bowling-ball-size mammoth molar ended up as a
doorstop. After hearing the news, Howard raced back to see what he could salvage. He
telegrammed his supervisors on November 16:
EXTENSIVE BONE DEPOSIT AT NEW SITE. MOSTLY BISON, ALSO
HORSE & MAMMOTH. SOME EVIDENCE OF HEARTHS ALONG EDGES. WILL
TIE UP PERMISSIONS FOR FUTURE WORK.
Howard returned to Clovis in the summer of 1933 and systematically surveyed
Blackwater Draw, looking for areas in which, like Folsom, human artifacts and extinct
species were mixed together. He quickly found several and set to digging. Once again,
the telegrams went out. A parade of dignitaries from the East trooped out to inspect the
excavations. Howard worked at Clovis for four years, each time staffing the field crews
with a mix of sunburned locals in boots and jeans and well-tailored Ivy League college
students on vacation. “One greenhorn was heard upbraiding his Massachusetts friend for
not having perceived at once, as did he,” Howard’s chief assistant later recalled, “that the
purpose of a [local farmer’s] windmill was for fanning heat-exhausted cattle.” Windmills
were not the only surprise in store for the students. The temperature in the digging pits
sometimes hit 130 ° F.
Slowly peeling away the geological layers, Howard’s workers revealed that
Blackwater Draw had hosted not one, but two ancient societies. One had left relics just
like those at Folsom. Below the dirt strata with these objects, though, was a layer of quite
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different artifacts: bigger, thicker, and not as beautifully made. This second, earlier
culture became known as the Clovis culture.
Because Clovis was so dry, its stratigraphy—the sequence of geological
layers—had not been jumbled up by later waterflow, a common archaeological hazard.
Because of this unusual clarity and because Howard meticulously documented his work
there, even the most skeptical archaeologists quickly accepted the existence and antiquity
of the Clovis culture. To trumpet his findings, Howard arranged for the Academy of
Natural Sciences, in Philadelphia, to sponsor an international symposium on Early Man.
More than four hundred scientists migrated to Philadelphia from Europe, Asia, Africa,
and Australia. The symposium featured a full-scale reproduction, fifteen feet wide and
thirty-four feet long, complete with actual artifacts and bones, of a particularly profitable
section of Howard’s excavation. (Whiteman was not invited; he died in Clovis in 2003 at
the age of ninety-one.)
The most prominent speaker in Philadelphia was Aleš Hrdli ka, then sixty-eight.
Hrdli ka gave Clovis the ultimate accolade: silence. Before one of the biggest
archaeological audiences in history, Hrdli ka chose to discuss the skeletal evidence for
Indians’ early arrival in the Americas. He listed every new find of old bones in the last
two decades, and scoffed at them all. “So far as human skeletal remains are concerned,”
he concluded, “there is to this moment no evidence that would justify the assumption of
any great, i.e., geological antiquity” for American Indians. Every word Hrdli ka said
was true—but irrelevant. By focusing on skeletons, he was able to avoid discussing
*16
Clovis, the focus of the conference, because Howard had found no skeletons there.
Clovis culture had a distinctive set of tools: scrapers, spear-straighteners,
hatchetlike choppers, crescent-moon-shaped objects whose function remains unknown.
Its hallmark was the “Clovis point,” a four-inch spearhead with a slightly cut-in, concave
tail; in silhouette, the points somewhat resemble those goldfish-shaped cocktail crackers.
Folsom points, by contrast, are smaller and finer—perhaps two inches long and an eighth
of an inch thick—and usually have a less prominent tail. Both types have wide, shallow
grooves or channels called “flutes” cut into the two faces of the head. The user apparently
laid the tip of the spear shaft in the flute and twisted hide or sinew repeatedly around the
assembly to hold it together. When the point broke, inevitable with stone tools, the head
could be loosened and slid forward on the shaft, letting the user chip a new point. A
paleo-Indian innovation, this type of fluting exists only in the Americas.
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Clovis (left) and Folsom points (shown to scale; fluting at bases)
With Blackwater Draw as a pattern, scientists knew exactly what to look for.
During the next few decades, they discovered more than eighty large paleo-Indian sites
throughout the United States, Mexico, and southern Canada. All of them had either
Folsom or Clovis points, which convinced many archaeologists that the Clovis people,
the earlier of the two, must have been the original Americans.
Nobody really knew how old the Clovis people were, though, because geological
strata can’t be dated precisely. Figgins surmised that Folsom had been inhabited fifteen to
twenty thousand years ago, which meant that Clovis must be a little before that. More
precise dates did not come in until the 1950s, when Willard F. Libby, a chemist at the
University of Chicago, invented carbon dating.
Libby’s research began in the global scientific race during the 1930s and 1940s to
understand cosmic rays, the mysterious, ultrahigh-velocity subatomic particles that
continually rain onto the earth from outer space. Like so many bullets, the particles slam
into air molecules in the upper atmosphere, knocking off fragments that in turn strike
other air molecules. Along the way, Libby realized, the cascade of interactions creates a
trickle of carbon-14 (C 14 ), a mildly radioactive form of carbon that over time
disintegrates—decays, as scientists say—back into a form of nitrogen. Libby determined
that the rate at which cosmic rays create C 14 is roughly equal to the rate at which it
decays. As a result, a small but steady percentage of the carbon in air, sea, and land
consists of C 14 . Plants take in C 14 through photosynthesis, herbivores take it in from the
plants, and carnivores take it in from them. In consequence, every living cell has a
consistent, low level of C 14 —they are all very slightly radioactive, a phenomenon that
Libby first observed empirically.
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When people, plants, and animals die, they stop assimilating C 14 . The C 14 already
inside their bodies continues to decay, and as a result the percentage of C 14 in the dead
steadily drops. The rate of decline is known precisely; every 5,730 years, half of the C 14
atoms in nonliving substances become regular carbon atoms. By comparing the C 14 level
in bones and wooden implements to the normal level in living tissues, Libby reasoned,
scientists should be able to determine the age of these objects with unheard-of precision.
It was as if every living creature had an invisible radioactive clock in its cells.
In 1949 Libby and a collaborator ascertained the C 14 level in, among other things,
a mummy coffin, a piece of Hittite floor, an Egyptian pharaoh’s funerary boat, and the
tomb of Sneferu of Meydum, the first Fourth Dynasty pharaoh. Archaeologists already
knew their dates of construction, usually from written records; the scientists wanted to
compare their estimates to the known dates. Even though Libby and his collaborator were
still learning how to measure C 14 , their estimates were rarely more than a century off—a
level of agreement, they wrote dryly, that was “seen to be satisfactory.”
Libby won a well-deserved Nobel Prize in 1960. By that time, carbon dating was
already revolutionizing archaeology. “You read books and find statements that such and
such a society or archaeological site is 20,000 years old,” he remarked. “We learned
rather abruptly that these numbers, these ancient ages, are not known.” Archaeologists
had been making inferences from limited, indirect data. With radiocarbon, these numbers,
these ancient ages, could be known, and with ever-increasing accuracy.
One of the first tasks assigned to the new technique was determining the age of
the Clovis culture. Much of the work occurred at the University of Arizona, in Tucson,
which in 1958 established the world’s first major archaeological carbon-dating
laboratory. At the new lab was a doctoral student named C. Vance Haynes. Haynes was a
mining engineer who became fascinated by archaeology during a stint in the air force.
While serving at a base in the Southwest, he began collecting arrowheads, a hobby that
ultimately led to his abandoning geology and coming to the University of Arizona as a
graduate student in archaeology. As the Clovis-culture dates crossed his lab bench,
Haynes was struck by their consistency. No matter what the location of a site, carbon
dating showed that it was occupied between 13,500 and 12,900 years ago.
*17 To
Haynes, with his geologist’s training, the dates were auspicious. The Clovis culture arose
just after the only time period in which migration from Siberia seemed to have been
possible.
During the Ice Ages so much of the world’s water was frozen into glaciers that
sea levels fell as much as four hundred feet. The strait between Siberia’s Chukotsky
Peninsula and Alaska’s Seward Peninsula is now only 56 miles wide and about 120 feet
deep, shallower than many lakes. The decline in sea levels let the two peninsulas join up.
What had been a frigid expanse of whale habitat became a flat stretch of countryside
more than a thousand miles wide. Beringia, as this land is called, was surprisingly
temperate, sometimes even warmer than it is today; masses of low flowers covered it
every spring. The relative salubriousness of the climate may seem incredible, given that
Beringia is on the Arctic Circle and the world was still in the throes of the Ice Ages, but
many lines of evidence suggest that it is true. In Siberia and Alaska, for instance,
paleoentomologists—scientists who study ancient insects—have discovered in
late-Pleistocene sediments fossil beetles and weevils of species that live only in places
where summer temperatures reach the fifties.
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C. Vance Haynes
Beringia was easily traversable. Western Canada was not, because it was buried
beneath two massive, conjoined ice sheets, each thousands of feet deep and two thousand
miles long. Even today, crossing a vast, splintered wilderness of ice would be a risky task
requiring special vehicles and a big support staff. For whole bands to walk across it with
backpacks full of supplies would be effectively impossible. (In any case, why would they
want to do it?
There was a short period, though, when the barrier could be avoided—or at least
some scientists so believed. The Ice Ages drew to a close about fifteen thousand years
ago. As the climate warmed, the glaciers slowly melted and sea levels rose; within three
thousand years, Beringia had again disappeared beneath the waves. In the 1950s some
geologists concluded that between the beginning of the temperature rise and the
resubmergence of the land bridge the inland edges of the two great ice sheets in western
Canada shrank, forming a comparatively hospitable pathway between them. This ice-free
corridor ran down the Yukon River Valley and along the eastern side of the Canadian
Rockies. Even as the Pacific advanced upon Beringia, these geologists said, plant and
animal life recolonized the ice-free corridor. And it did so just in time to let paleo-Indians
through.
In a crisply argued paper in Science in 1964, Haynes drew attention to the
correlation between the birth of “an ice-free, trans-Canadian corridor” and the “abrupt
appearance of Clovis artifacts some 700 years later.” Thirteen thousand to fourteen
thousand years ago, he suggested, a window in time opened. During this interval—and,
for all practical purposes, only during this interval—paleo-Indians could have crossed
Beringia, slipped through the ice-free corridor, and descended into southern Alberta, from
where they would have been able to spread throughout North America. The implication
was that every Indian society in the hemisphere was descended from Clovis. The people
at Blackwater Draw were the ancestral culture of the Americas.
Haynes was the first to put together this picture. The reaction, he told me, was
“pretty gratifying.” The fractious archaeological community embraced his ideas with rare
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unanimity; they rapidly became the standard model for the peopling of the Americas. On
the popular level, Haynes’s scenario made so much intuitive sense that it rapidly leapt
from the pages of Science to high school history textbooks, mine among them. Three
years later, in 1967, the picture was augmented with overkill.
If time travelers from today were to visit North America in the late Pleistocene,
they would see in the forests and plains an impossible bestiary of lumbering mastodon,
armored rhinos, great dire wolves, sabertooth cats, and ten-foot-long glyptodonts like
enormous armadillos. Beavers the size of armchairs; turtles that weighed almost as much
as cars; sloths able to reach tree branches twenty feet high; huge, flightless, predatory
birds like rapacious ostriches—the tally of Pleistocene monsters is long and alluring.
At about the time of Clovis almost every one of these species vanished. So
complete was the disaster that most of today’s big American mammals, such as caribou,
moose, and brown bear, are immigrants from Asia. The die-off happened amazingly fast,
much of it in the few centuries between 11,500 and 10,900 B.C. And when it was
complete, naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace wrote, the Americas had become “a
zoologically impoverished world, from which all of the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest
forms [had] recently disappeared.”
The extinctions permanently changed American landscapes and American history.
Before the Pleistocene, the Americas had three species of horse and at least two camels
that might have been ridden; other mammals could have been domesticated for meat and
milk. Had they survived, the consequences would have been huge. Not only would
domesticated animals have changed Indian societies, they might have created new
zoonotic diseases. Absent the extinctions, the encounter between Europe and the
Americas might have been equally deadly for both sides—a world in which both
hemispheres experienced catastrophic depopulation.
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PALEO-INDIAN MIGRATION ROUTES
North America, 10,000 B.C.
Researchers had previously noted the temporal coincidence between the
paleo-Indians’ arrival and the mass extinction, but they didn’t believe that small bands of
hunters could wreak such ecological havoc. Paul Martin, a paleontologist who was one of
Haynes’s Arizona colleagues, thought otherwise. Extinction, he claimed, was the
nigh-inevitable outcome when beasts with no exposure to Homo sapiens suddenly
encountered “a new and thoroughly superior predator, a hunter who preferred killing and
persisted in killing animals as long as they were available.”
Imagine, Martin said, that an original group of a hundred hunters crossed over
Beringia and down the ice-free corridor. Historical records show that frontier populations
can increase at astonishing rates; in the early nineteenth century, the annual U.S. birthrate
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climbed as high as 5 percent. If the first paleo-Indians doubled in number every 20 years
(a birthrate of 3.4 percent), the population would hit 10 million in only 340 years, a blink
of an eye in geological terms. A million paleo-Indians, Martin argued, could easily form
a wave of hunters that would radiate out from the southern end of the ice-free corridor,
turning the continent into an abattoir. Even with conservative assumptions about the rate
of paleo-Indian expansion, the destructive front would reach the Gulf of Mexico in three
to five centuries. Within a thousand years it would strike Tierra del Fuego. In the
archaeological record, Martin pointed out, this hurricane of slaughter would be visible
only as the near-simultaneous appearance of Clovis artifacts throughout North
America—and “the swift extermination of the more conspicuous native American large
mammals.” Which, in fact, is exactly what one sees.
Not everyone was convinced by Martin’s model. Paleontologists noted that many
non-game species vanished, too, which in their view suggests that the extinction wave
was more likely due to the abrupt climatic changes at the end of the Pleistocene; Martin
pointed out that previous millennia had experienced equally wild shifts with no extinction
spasm. In addition, similar extinctions occurred when human beings first invaded
Madagascar, Australia, New Zealand, and the Polynesian Islands.
Despite overkill’s failure to enjoy full acceptance, it helped set in stone what
became the paradigmatic image of the first Americans. Highly mobile, scattered in small
bands, carnivorous to a fault, the paleo-Indians conjured by archaeologists were, above
all, “stout-hearted, daring, and voracious big-game hunters,” in the skeptical summary of
Norman Easton, an anthropologist at Yukon College, in Whitehorse. Clovis people were
thought to have a special yen for mammoth: great ambulatory meat lockers. Sometimes
they herded the hairy creatures en masse into gullies or entangling bogs, driving the
animals to their doom with shouts, dogs, torches, and, possibly, shamanic incantations.
More often, though, hunters stalked individual beasts until they were close enough to
throw a spear in the gut. “Then you just follow them around for a day or two until they
keel over from blood loss or infection,” Charles Kay, an ecological archaeologist at Utah
State University, told me. “It’s not what we think of as sporting, but it’s very effective
and a hell of a lot safer than hand-to-hand combat with a mammoth.”
Shifting location to follow game, the Clovis people prowled roughly circular
territories that could have been two hundred miles in diameter (the size would vary
depending on the environmental setting). With any luck, the territory would contain flint,
jasper, or chalcedony, the raw material for spear points, meat scrapers, and other hunting
tools. Bands may have had as many as fifty members, with girls going outside the group
to marry. At camp, women and girls made clothes, gathered food—wild plums,
blackberries, grapes—and tended babies. Men and boys went hunting, possibly as a
group of fathers and sons, probably for days at a time.
As the extinctions proceeded, the Clovis people switched from mammoths to the
smaller, more numerous bison. The spear points grew smaller, the hunting more
systematic (with prey becoming scarcer, it needed to be). Bands camped on ridges
overlooking ponds—the men wanted to spot herds when they came to drink. When the
animals plunged their muzzles into the water, hunting parties attacked, forcing the
startled bison to flee into a dead-end gully. The beasts bellowed in confusion and pain as
the paleo-Indians moved in with jabbing spears. Sometimes they slaughtered a dozen or
more at once. Each hunter may have gobbled down as much as ten pounds of bison flesh
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a day. They came back staggering under the load of meat. Life in this vision of early
America was hard but pleasant; in most ways, archaeologists said, it was not that
different from life elsewhere on the planet at the time.
Except that it may not have been like that at all.
CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
In the early 1980s a magazine asked me to report on a long-running legal battle
over Pacific Northwest salmon. A coalition of Indian tribes had taken Washington State
to court over a treaty it had signed with them in 1854, when the state was still part of the
Oregon Territory. In the treaty, the territory promised to respect the Indians’ “right of
taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations,” which the tribes
interpreted as guaranteeing them a share of the annual salmon harvests. Washington State
said that the treaty did not mean what the Indians claimed, and in any case that
circumstances had changed too much for it still to be binding. The courts repeatedly
endorsed the Indian view and the state repeatedly appealed, twice reaching the U.S.
Supreme Court. As the Indians approached final victory, tension rose in the fishing
industry, then almost entirely controlled by whites. The magazine wanted me to write
about the fight.
To learn more about the dispute, I visited the delta of the Nisqually River, at the
southern tip of Puget Sound. Housing the Nisqually tribe, the sliver of land that is their
reservation, and the riverbank meadow on which the treaty was signed, the delta is passed
through, unnoticed, every day by the thousands of commuters on the interstate highway
that slices through the reservation. At the time of my visit, the Nisqually had been
annoying state authorities for decades, tenaciously pursuing what they believed to be
their right to fish on their ancestral fishing grounds. I met the Franks, the stubborn,
charismatic father-and-son team who then more or less ran the tribe, in a cluttered office
that in my recollection occupied half of a double-wide trailer. Both had been arrested
many times for “protest fishing”—fishing when the state said they couldn’t—and were
the guiding spirits behind the litigation. After we spoke, Billy Frank, the son, told me I
should visit Medicine Creek, where the Nisqually and eight other tribes had negotiated
the treaty. And he asked someone who was hanging around to give me a tour.
That someone introduced himself as Denny. He was slim and stylish with very
long black hair that fell unbound over the shoulders of his Levi jacket. Sewn on the back
of the jacket was a replica of the American eagle on the dollar bill. A degree in semiotics
was not required to see that I was in the presence of an ironist. He was not a Nisqually, he
said, but from another Northwest group—at this remove, I can’t recall which. We
clambered into an old truck with scraped side panels. As we set off, Denny asked, “Are
you an archaeologist?”
Journalist, I told him.
“Good,” he said, slamming the truck into gear.
Because journalists rarely meet with such enthusiasm, I guessed—correctly—that
his approval referred to my non-archaeological status. In this way I learned that
archaeologists have aroused the ire of some Native American activists.
We drove to a small boat packed with fishing gear that was tied down on the edge
of the Nisqually. Denny got the motor running and we puttered downstream, looking for
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harbor seals, which he said sometimes wandered up the river. Scrubby trees stood out
from gravel banks, and beneath them, here and there, were the red-flushed, spawned-out
bodies of salmon, insects happy around them. Freeway traffic was clearly audible. After
half an hour we turned up a tributary and made land on a muddy bank. A hundred yards
away was a tall snag, the dead stalk of a Douglas fir, standing over the meadow like a
sentinel. The treaty negotiations had been conducted in its shelter. From under its
branches the territorial governor had triumphantly emerged with two sheets of paper
which he said bore the X marks of sixty-two Indian leaders, some of whom actively
opposed the treaty and apparently were not at the signing.
Throughout our little excursion Denny talked. He told me that the claw holding
the arrows on the back of the one-dollar bill was copied by Benjamin Franklin from an
incident in Haudenosaunee lore; that the army base next door sometimes fired shells over
the reservation; that Billy Frank once had been arrested with Marlon Brando; that a story
Willie Frank, Billy’s father, had told me about his grandparents picking up
smallpox-infected blankets on the beach was probably not true, but instead was an
example of Willie’s fondness for spoofing gullible journalists; that Denny knew a guy
who also had an eagle on the back of his jean jacket, but who, unlike Denny, could make
the eagle flex its wings by moving his shoulders in a certain way that Denny admired;
that most Indians hate the Internal Revenue Service even more than they hate the Bureau
of Indian Affairs, because they believe that they paid taxes for all time when the federal
government forced them to give up two billion acres of land; and that if I really wanted to
see a crime against nature, I should visit the Quinault reservation, on the Olympic
Peninsula, which had been plundered by loggers in the 1950s (I did, a few weeks
afterward; Denny was right). He also explained to me why he and some other Indians had
it in for archaeologists. The causes were many, in his telling, but two of them seemed
especially pertinent: Aleš Hrdli ka and the overkill hypothesis.
Hrdli ka’s zeal for completeness made him accumulate as many Indian
skeletons as possible. Unfortunately, his fascination with the bones of old Indians was not
matched by an equivalent interest in the sensibilities of living Native Americans. Both his
zeal and his indifference were gaudily on display on Kodiak Island, Alaska, where he
exhumed about a thousand skeletons between 1932 and 1936 at Larsen Bay, a village of
Alutiiq Indians. Many of the dead were two thousand years old, but some were ripped
from recent Alutiiq graves, and a few were not Alutiiq at all—the wife of a local
salmon-cannery manager, eager to help Science, shipped Hrdli ka the cadavers of
Chinese workers when they died.
Larsen Bay was the single most productive excavation of Hrdli ka’s long career.
Confronted with what he viewed as an intellectual treasure trove, this precise, meticulous,
formal man was to all appearances overcome by enthusiasm and scholarly greed. In his
pop-eyed hurry to pull bones out of the ground, he tore open the site with a bulldozer and
didn’t bother taking notes, sketching maps, or executing profile drawings. Without
documentation, Hrdli ka was unable afterward to make head or tail of the houses,
storage pits, hearths, and burial wells he uncovered. He pored through old Russian and
American accounts of the area to find answers, but he never asked the people in Larsen
Bay about their own culture. Perhaps his failure to approach the Alutiiq was a good thing.
Hrdli ka’s excavation, made without their permission, so angered them that they were
still steaming when Denny was there on a salmon boat fifty years later. (In 1991 the
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Smithsonian gave back the skeletons, which the townspeople reburied.)
Overkill was part of the same mindset, Denny told me. As the environmental
movement gathered steam in the 1960s, he said, white people had discovered that Indians
were better stewards of the land. Indigenous peoples were superior to them—horrors!
The archies—that was what Denny called archaeologists—had to race in and rescue
Caucasian self-esteem. Which they did with the ridiculous conceit that the Indians had
been the authors of an ecological mega-disaster. Typical, Denny thought. In his view,
archaeologists’ main function was to make white people feel good about themselves—an
opinion that archaeologists have learned, to their cost, is not Denny’s alone.
“Archaeologists are trapped in their own prejudices,” Vine Deloria Jr., the
Colorado political scientist, told me. The Berkeley geographer Carl Sauer first brought up
overkill in the 1930s, he said. “It was immediately knocked down, because a lot of
shellfish and little mammals also went extinct, and these mythical Pleistocene hit men
wouldn’t have wiped them out, too. But the supposedly objective scientific establishment
likes the picture of Indians as ecological serial killers too much to let go of it.”
To Deloria’s way of thinking, not only overkill but the entire Clovis-first theory is
a theoretical Rube Goldberg device. “There’s this perfect moment when the ice-free
corridor magically appears just before the land bridge is covered by water,” he said. “And
the paleo-Indians, who are doing fine in Siberia, suddenly decide to sprint over to Alaska.
And then they sprint through the corridor, which just in time for them has been
replenished with game. And they keep sprinting so fast that they overrun the hemisphere
even faster than the Europeans did—and this even though they didn’t have horses,
because they were so busy killing them all.” He laughed. “And these are the same people
who say traditional origin tales are improbable!”
Activist critiques like those from Denny and Deloria have had relatively little
impact on mainstream archaeologists and anthropologists. In a sense, they were
unnecessary: scientists themselves have launched such a sustained attack on the primacy
of Clovis, the existence of the ice-free corridor, and the plausibility of overkill that the
Clovis consensus has shattered, probably irrecoverably.
In 1964, the year Haynes announced the Clovis-first model, archaeologist Alex D.
Krieger listed fifty sites said to be older than Clovis. By 1988 Haynes and other
authorities had shot them all down with such merciless dispatch that victims complained
of persecution by the “Clovis police.” Haynes, the dissenters said, was a new Hrdli ka
(minus the charge of insensitivity to living Native Americans). As before, archaeologists
became gun-shy about arguing that Indians arrived in the Americas before the canonical
date. Perhaps as a result, the most persuasive scientific critiques on Clovis initially came
from fields that overlapped archaeology, but were mainly outside of it: linguistics,
molecular biology, and geology.
From today’s vantage, the attack seems to have begun, paradoxically, with the
publication in 1986 of a landmark pro-Clovis paper in Current Anthropology by a
linguist, a physical anthropologist, and a geneticist. The linguistic section attracted
special attention. Students of languages had long puzzled over the extraordinary variety
and fragmentation of Indian languages. California alone was the home of as many as 86
tongues, which linguists have classified into between 5 and 15 families (the schemes
disagree with one another). No one family was dominant. Across the Americas, Indians
spoke some 1,200 separate languages that have been classified into as many as 180
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linguistic families. By contrast, all of Europe has just 4 language
families—Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Basque, and Turkic—with the great majority of
Europeans speaking an Indo-European tongue. Linguists had long wondered how Indians
could have evolved so many languages in the thirteen thousand years since Clovis when
Europeans had ended up with many fewer in the forty thousand years since the arrival of
humans there.
In the first part of the 1986 article, Joseph H. Greenberg, a linguist at Stanford,
proclaimed that the profusion of idioms was more apparent than real. After four decades
of comparing Native American vocabularies and grammars, he had concluded that Indian
languages belonged to just three main linguistic families: Aleut, spoken by northern
peoples in a broad band from Alaska to Greenland; NaDené, spoken in western Canada
and the U.S. Southwest; and Amerind, much the biggest family, spoken everywhere else,
including all of Central and South America. “The three linguistic stocks,” Greenberg
said, “represent separate migrations.”
According to Greenberg’s linguistic analysis, paleo-Indians had crossed over
Beringia not once, but thrice. Using glottochronology he estimated that the ancestors of
Aleuts had crossed the strait around 2000 B.C. and that the ancestors of Na-Dené had
made the journey around 7000 B.C. As for Amerind, Greenberg thought, “we are dealing
with a time period probably greater than eleven thousand years.” But it was not that much
greater, which indicated that the ancestors of Amerind-speaking peoples came over at just
about the time that Clovis showed up in the archaeological record. Clovis-first, yes, but
Clovis the first of three.
In the same article, Christy G. Turner II, a physical anthropologist at Arizona
State, supported the three-migrations scheme with dental evidence. All humans have the
same number and type of teeth, but their characteristics—incisor shape, canine size,
molar root number, the presence or absence of grooves on tooth faces—differ slightly in
ways that are consistent within ethnic groups. In a fantastically painstaking process,
Turner measured “28 key crown and root traits” in more than 200,000 Indian teeth. He
discovered that Indians formed “three New World dental clusters” corresponding to
Greenberg’s Aleut, Na-Dené, and Amerind. By comparing tooth variation in Asian
populations, Turner estimated the approximate rate at which the secondary characteristics
in teeth evolved. (Because these factors make no difference to dental function,
anthropologists assume that any changes reflect random mutation, which biologists in
turn assume occurs at a roughly constant rate.) Applying his “worldwide rate of dental
microevolution” to the three migrations, Turner came up with roughly similar dates of
emigration. Amerinds, he concluded, had split off from northeast Asian groups about
fourteen thousand years ago, which fit well “with the widely held view that the first
Americans were the Clovis-culture big-game-hunting paleo-Indians.”
The article provoked vigorous reaction, not all of the sort that its authors wished.
In hindsight, a hint of what was to come lay in its third section, in which Arizona State
geneticist Stephen L. Zegura conceded that the “tripartite division of modern Native
Americans is still without strong confirmation” from molecular biology. To the authors’
critics, the lack of confirmation had an obvious cause: the whole three-migrations theory
was wrong. “Neither their linguistic classification nor their dental/genetic correlation is
supported,” complained Lyle Campbell, of the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Greenberg’s three-family division, Campbell thought, “should be shouted down in order
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not to confuse nonspecialists.” The Amerind-language family was so enormous, Berkeley
linguist Johanna Nichols complained, that the likelihood of being able to prove it actually
existed was “somewhere between zero and hopeless.”
Although the three-migrations theory was widely attacked, it spurred geneticists
to pursue research into Native American origins. The main battleground was
mitochondrial DNA, the special DNA with which Pena, the Brazilian geneticist, hoped to
find the Botocudo. As I mentioned before, a scientific team led by Douglas Wallace
found in 1990 that almost all Indians belong to one of four mitochondrial haplogroups,
three of which are common in Asia (mitochondria with similar genetic characteristics,
such as a particular mutation or version of a gene, belong to the same haplogroup).
Wallace’s discovery initially seemed to confirm the three-migrations model: the
haplogroups were seen as the legacy of separate waves of migration, with the most
common haplogroup corresponding to the Clovis culture. Wallace came up with further
data when he began working with James Neel, the geneticist who studied the Yanomami
response to measles.
In earlier work, Neel had combined data from multiple sources to estimate that
two related groups of Central American Indians had split off from each other eight
thousand to ten thousand years before. Now Neel and Wallace scrutinized the two
groups’ mitochondrial DNA. Over time, it should have accumulated mutations, almost all
of them tiny alterations in unused DNA that didn’t affect the mitochondria’s functions.
By counting the number of mutations that appeared in one group and not the other, Neel
and Wallace determined the rate at which the two groups’ mitochondrial DNA had
separately changed in the millennia since their separation: .2 to .3 percent every ten
thousand years. In 1994 Neel and Wallace sifted through mitochondrial DNA from
eighteen widely dispersed Indian groups, looking for mutations that had occurred since
their common ancestors left Asia. Using their previously calculated rate of genetic
change as a standard, they estimated when the original group had migrated to the
Americas: 22,414 to 29,545 years ago. Indians had come to the Americas ten thousand
years before Clovis.
Three years later, Sandro L. Bonatto and Francisco M. Bolzano, two geneticists at
the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, in the southern Brazilian city of Pôrto
Alegre, analyzed Indian mitochondrial DNA again—and painted a different picture.
Wallace and Neel had focused on the three haplogroups that are also common in Asia.
Instead, the Brazilians looked at the fourth main haplogroup—Haplogroup A is its
unimaginative name—which is almost completely absent from Siberia but found in every
Native American population. Because of its rarity in Siberia, the multiple-migrations
theory had the implicit and very awkward corollary that the tiny minority of people with
Haplogroup A just happened to be among the small bands that crossed Beringia—not just
once, but several times. The two men argued it was more probable that a single migration
had left Asia, and that some people in Haplogroup A were in it.
By tallying the accumulated genetic differences in Haplogroup A members,
Bonatto and Bolzano calculated that Indians had left Asia thirty-three thousand to
forty-three thousand years ago, even earlier than estimated by Wallace and Neel. Not
only that, the measurements by Bonatto and Bolzano suggested that soon after the
migrants arrived in Beringia they split in two. One half set off for Canada and the United
States. Meanwhile, the other half remained in Beringia, which was then comparatively
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hospitable. The paleo-Indians who went south would not have had a difficult journey,
because they arrived a little bit before the peak of the last Ice Age—before, that is, the
two glacial sheets in Canada merged together. When that ice barrier closed, though, the
Indians who stayed in Beringia were stuck there for the duration: almost twenty thousand
years. Finally the temperatures rose, and some of them went south, creating a second
wave and then, possibly, a third. In other words, just one group of paleo-Indians
colonized the Americas, but it did so two or three times.
As other measurements came in, the confusion only increased. Geneticists
disagreed about whether the totality of the data implied one or more migrations; whether
the ancestral population(s) were small (as some measure of mitochondrial DNA diversity
suggested) or large (as others indicated); whether Indians had migrated from Mongolia,
the region around Lake Baikal in southern Siberia, or coastal east Asia, even possibly
Japan.
Everything seemed up for grabs—or, anyway, almost everything. In the welter of
contradictory data, University of Hawaii geneticist Rebecca L. Cann reported in 2001,
“only one thing is certain”: scientists may argue about everything else, she said, but they
all believe that “the ‘Clovis First’ archaeological model of a late entry of migrants into
North America is unsupported by the bulk of new archaeological and genetic evidence.”
COAST TO COAST
The “new archaeological evidence” to which Cann referred was from Monte
Verde, a boggy Chilean riverbank excavated by Tom Dillehay of the University of
Kentucky; Mario Pino of the University of Chile in Valdivia; and a team of students and
specialists. They began work in 1977, finished excavation in 1985, and published their
final reports in two massive volumes in 1989 and 1997. In the twenty years between the
first shovelsful of dirt and the final errata sheets, the scientists concluded that
paleo-Indians had occupied Monte Verde at least 12,800 years ago. Not only that, they
turned up suggestive indications of human habitation more than 32,000 years ago. Monte
Verde, in southern Chile, is ten thousand miles from the Bering Strait. Archaeologists
have tended to believe that paleo-Indians would have needed millennia to walk from the
north end of the Americas to the south. If Monte Verde was a minimum of 12,800 years
old, Indians must have come to the Americas thousands of years before that. For the most
part, archaeologists had lacked the expertise to address the anti-Clovis evidence from
genetics and linguistics. But Monte Verde was archaeology. Dillehay had dug up
something like a village, complete with tent-like structures made from animal hides,
lashed together by poles and twisted reeds—a culture that he said had existed centuries
before Clovis, and that may have been more sophisticated. Skepticism was forceful, even
rancorous; arguments lasted for years, with critics charging that Dillehay’s evidence was
too low-quality to accept. “People refused to shake my hand at meetings,” Dillehay told
me. “It was like I was killing their children.”
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Tom Dillehay
In 1997 a dozen prominent researchers, Haynes among them, flew to Chile to
examine the site and its artifacts. The hope was to settle the long-standing dispute by
re-creating the graybeards’ visit to Folsom. After inspecting the site itself—a wet, peaty
bank strikingly unlike the sere desert home of Folsom and Clovis—the archaeologists
ended up at a dimly lighted cantina with the appropriate name of La Caverna. Over a
round of beers an argument erupted, prompted, in part, by Haynes’s persistent skepticism.
Dillehay told Haynes his experience with stone tools in Arizona was useless in evaluating
wooden implements in Peru, and then stomped outside with a supporter. But despite the
heated words, a fragile consensus emerged. The experts wrote an article making public
their unanimous conclusion. “Monte Verde is real,” Alex W. Barker, now at the
Milwaukee Public Museum, told the New York Times. “It’s a whole new ball game.”
Not everyone wanted to play. Two years later Stuart J. Fiedel, a consulting
archaeologist in Alexandria, Virginia, charged that Dillehay’s just-published final Monte
Verde report was so poorly executed—“bungled” and “loathsome” were among the
descriptors he provided when we spoke—that verifying the original location “of virtually
every ‘compelling,’ unambiguous artifact” on the site was impossible. Stone tools, which
many archaeologists regard as the most important artifacts, have no organic carbon and
therefore cannot be carbon-dated. Researchers must reckon their ages by ascertaining the
age of the ground they are found in, which in turn requires meticulously documenting
their provenance. Because Dillehay’s team had failed to identify properly the location of
the stone tools in Monte Verde, Fiedel said, their antiquity was up to question; they could
have been in a recent sediment layer. Haynes, who had authenticated Monte Verde in
1997, announced in 1999 that the site needed “further testing.”
The dispute over the Clovis model kept growing. In the 1990s geologists laid out
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data indicating that the ice sheets were bigger and longer lasting than had been thought,
and that even when the ice-free corridor existed it was utterly inhospitable. Worse,
archaeologists could find no traces of paleo-Indians (or the big mammals they supposedly
hunted) in the corridor from the right time. Meanwhile, paleontologists learned that about
two-thirds of the species that vanished did so a little before Clovis appears in the
archaeological record. Finally, Clovis people may not have enjoyed hunting that much.
Of the seventy-six U.S. paleo-Indian camps surveyed by Meltzer and Donald K. Grayson,
an archaeologist at the University of Washington at Seattle, only fourteen showed
evidence of big-game hunting, all of it just two species, mastodon and bison. “The
overkill hypothesis lives on,” the two men sneered, “not because of [support from]
archaeologists and paleontologists who are expert in the area, but because it keeps getting
repeated by those who are not.”
Clovis defenders remained as adamant as their critics. Regarding Monte Verde,
Haynes told me, “My comment is, where are the photographs of these ‘artifacts’ when
they were in place? If you’re trying to prove that site to other archaeologists and you find
an unequivocal stone artifact in situ in a site that’s twelve thousand years old, everyone
should run over with a camera. It wasn’t until after we brought this up that they dug up
some photographs. And they were fuzzy! I really became a doubter then.” Such putative
pre-Clovis sites are “background radiation,” he said. “I’m convinced that a hundred years
from now there will still be these ‘pre-Clovis’ sites, and this will go on ad infinitum.”
“Some of our colleagues seem to have gone seriously wrong,” lamented Thomas
F. Lynch of Texas A&M in the Review of Archaeology in 2001. Proudly claiming that he
had helped “blow the whistle” on other Clovis challengers, Lynch described the gathering
support for pre-Clovis candidates as a manifestation of “political correctness.” He
predicted that Monte Verde would eventually “fade away.”
For better or worse, most archaeologists with whom I have spoken act as if the
Clovis-first model were wrong, while still accepting that it might be correct. Truly ardent
Clovisites, like Low Counters, are “in a definite minority now,” according to Michael
Crawford, a University of Kansas anthropologist—a conclusion that Fiedel, Haynes, and
other skeptics ruefully echo. Following Monte Verde, at least three other pre-Clovis sites
gained acceptance, though each continued to have its detractors.
The ultimate demise of the Clovis dogma is inevitable, David Henige, author of
Numbers from Nowhere, told me. “Archaeologists are always dating something to five
thousand years ago and then saying that this must be the first time it occurred because
they haven’t found any earlier examples. And then, incredibly, they defend this idea to
the death. It’s logically indefensible.” Clovis-first, he said, is “a classic example of
arguing from silence. Even in archaeology, which isn’t exactly rocket science”—he
chuckled—“there’s only so long you can get away with it.”
HUGGING THE SHORE
Since Holmes and Hrdli ka, archaeologists and anthropologists have tried to
separate themselves from Abbott’s modern descendants: the mob of sweaty-palmed
archaeology buffs who consume books about Atlantis and run Web sites about aliens in
Peru and medieval Welsh in Iowa. The consensus around Clovis helped beat them back,
but the confused back-and-forth ushered in by the genetic studies has provided a new
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opening. Unable to repel the quacks with a clear theory of their own, archaeologists and
anthropologists found themselves enveloped in a cloud of speculation.
The most notorious recent example of this phenomenon is surely Kennewick
Man. A 9,400-year-old skeleton that turned up near Kennewick, Washington, in 1997,
Kennewick Man became a center of controversy when an early reconstruction of the
skeleton’s face suggested that it had Caucasian features (or, more precisely, “Caucasoid”
features). The reconstruction, published in newspapers and magazines around the world,
elicited assertions that Indians had European ancestry. Archaeologists and Indian
activists, for once united, scoffed at this notion. Indian and European mitochondrial DNA
are strikingly different. How could Indians descend from Europeans if they did not inherit
their genetic makeup?
Yet, as Fiedel conceded to me, the collapse of the Clovis consensus means that
archaeologists must consider unorthodox possibilities, including that some other people
preceded the ancestors of today’s Indians into the Americas. Numerous candidates exist
for these prepaleo-Indians, among them the Lagoa Santa people, whose skulls more
resemble the skulls of Australian aborigines than those of Native Americans. Skull
gauging is, at best, an inexact science, and most archaeologists have dismissed the notion
of an Australian role in American prehistory. But in the fall of 2003 an article in the
journal Nature about ancient skulls in Baja California revived this possibility.
Aborigines, in one scenario, may have traveled from Australia to Tierra del Fuego via
Antarctica. Or else there was a single ancestral population split, with the ancestors of
Australians heading in one direction and the ancestors of Indians heading in another. In
either version of the scenario the ancestors of today’s Indians crossed the Bering Strait to
find the Americas already settled by Australians. Migration across Antarctica!—exactly
the sort of extravagant notion that the whitecoats sought to consign to the historical
dustbin. Now they may all be back. If Clovis was not first, the archaeology of the
Americas is wide open, a prospect variously feared and welcomed. “Anything goes now,
apparently,” Fiedel told me. “The lunatics have taken over the asylum.”
Despite such misgivings, one can see, squinting a little, the outlines of an
emerging theory. In the last few years researchers have focused more and more on a
proposal linked to the name of Knut Fladmark, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser
University, in British Columbia. As a graduate student in the mid-1970s, Fladmark was
so surprised to learn of the paucity of evidence for the ice-free corridor that he wondered
if paleo-Indians had instead gone down the Pacific coast by boat. After all, aborigines had
reached Australia by boat tens of thousands of years ago. Nonetheless, most
archaeologists pooh-poohed the idea, because there was no substantiation for it.
By examining pollen in the ocean sediments near the Pacific coastline, researchers
have recently learned that even in the depths of the Ice Age warm southern currents
created temperate refuges along the shore—islands of trees and grass in a landscape of
ice. Hopping from refuge to refuge, paleo-Indians could have made their way down the
coast at any time in the last forty thousand years. “Even primitive boats,” Fladmark has
written, “could traverse the entire Pacific coast of North and South America in less than
10–15 years.”
Evidence for the coastal route is sparse, not least because archaeologists have
never looked for paleo-Indian settlements on the shoreline. Future searches will be
difficult: thousands of years ago, the melting glaciers raised the seas, inundating coastal
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settlements, if they existed. Coastal-route proponents like to point out that Clovis-firsters
believed in the existence of the ice-free corridor without much supporting data. The
coastal route has equally little empirical backing, but in their view makes more sense.
Most important, the image of a seagoing people fits into a general rethinking of
paleo-Indian life.
Because the first-discovered Clovis site was a hunting camp, archaeologists have
usually assumed that Clovis society was focused on hunting. Indeed, Clovisites were
thought to have entered the ice-free corridor by pursuing game—“follow the reindeer,” as
skeptics refer to this scheme. In contemporary hunting and gathering societies,
anthropologists have learned, gathering by women usually supplies most of the daily diet.
The meat provided by male hunters is a kind of luxury, a special treat for a binge and
celebration, the Pleistocene equivalent of a giant box of Toblerone. Compared to its
brethren around the world, Clovis society, with its putative focus on massive,
exterminating hunts, would have been an anomaly. A coastal route helps bring the
paleo-Indians back in line.
Then as now, the Northwest Coast, thick with fruit and fruits de mer, was a
gatherer’s paradise: wild strawberries, wild blueberries, soapberries, huckleberries,
thimbleberries, salmonberries; clams, cockles, mussels, oysters; flounder, hake, salmon.
(To get breakfast, the local saying says, take a walk in the forest; to get dinner, wait for
low tide.) Perhaps the smell of candlefish fat, ubiquitous in later Northwest Coast Indian
cookery, even then hovered over the first visitors’ fires. One can guess that their boats
were not made of wood, because they had long lived on the almost treeless plains of
Beringia. Instead they may have been made from animal skin, a readily available
resource; though soft beneath the foot, fragile-looking hide vessels have been known to
traverse hundreds of miles of open water. A visitor to the Northwest twenty thousand
years ago might have seen such a craft bobbing over the waves like a long, floating
balloon, ten or twenty men lining its sides, chasing minke whales with stone-tipped
spears.
All of this is speculative, to say the least, and may well be wrong. Next year
geologists may decide the ice-free corridor was passable, after all. Or more hunting sites
could turn up. What seems unlikely to be undone is the awareness that Native Americans
may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years. Given
that the Ice Age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen
thousand years ago, the Western Hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as
the “New World.” Britain, home of my ancestor Billington, was empty until about 12,500
B.C., because it was still covered by glaciers. If Monte Verde is correct, as most believe,
people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still
empty of mankind and its works.
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Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize
(Tales of Two Civilizations, Part I)
BIG BUILDING
“Would you like to hold a four-thousand-year-old textile?”
Without waiting for my assent, Jonathan Haas slid the fabric into my hand. It was
about two inches on a side, little more than a scrap, and aged to the color of last season’s
straw. To my eye, it seemed carefully made: a warp of fine cotton threads, ten or fifteen
to the inch, crossed at half-inch intervals by paired weft threads in a basket-like pattern
known as “weft-twining.” Haas, an archaeologist at the Field Museum of Natural History,
in Chicago, had plucked the fabric from the earth minutes before, two graduate students
immortalizing the operation with digital cameras. Thousands of years ago it had been
handled or worn by other people; bits of their DNA might still adhere to the fibers. (If so,
I was contaminating it.) To be the first person in two hundred generations to see or touch
an object—to reach across time with eye and hand—is one of the reasons why people like
Haas spend their days sifting through ancient soil.
Ordinarily, archaeologists label and store such artifacts immediately. But just as
Haas removed the cloth from the ground, he was distracted by the excited shouts of a
group of workers a hundred feet away. Haas clambered over the rough ground to take a
look. Poking through the earth at the workers’ feet was something that resembled the
edge of a dinner plate. Haas kneeled to inspect it. When he came back to his feet, his
eyebrows had shot up like a pair of circumflexes. “What’s this doing here?” Haas asked
the air. “It looks like unfired ceramics.” The site was supposed to be very old—well
before the local invention of pottery. “Better have a look at it.” Reaching for the trowel in
his back pocket, he had realized that the textile was still in his hand, and asked if I would
mind hanging on to it.
“Would you like to hold a four-thousand-year-old textile?”
Haas was standing midway up a sixty-foot hummock in a valley along the central
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coast of Peru, about 130 miles north of Lima. The valley was desert, withered and
yellow-gray except for the crooked band of green that marked the course of the Fortaleza
River. In the late 1990s Haas and Winifred Creamer—his wife and co-teamleader, an
archaeologist at Northern Illinois University—assisted a research team led by a Peruvian
archaeologist, Ruth Shady Solis, that had spent years investigating an ancient ceremonial
center fifteen miles to the south. By carbon-dating some of Shady’s material, they helped
establish that the Peruvians had uncovered the oldest known city in the Americas.
Afterward, Haas, Creamer, and a Peruvian archaeologist, Álvaro Ruiz, drove a
four-by-four through the back roads of the area between that excavation and the Fortaleza
Valley. Called the Norte Chico, the region is studded with isolated knolls, twenty to fifty
feet high and as much as two hundred feet long. These mounds had been flagged as
possible ruins for nearly a century but never excavated because they seemed to have no
valuable gold or ceramic objects. The Pan-American Highway had been laid right
through them without causing an outcry. Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz had decided to drive
through the area because they suspected that the mounds might be more interesting and
numerous than had been realized. Ultimately, the three researchers determined that the
Norte Chico held the remains of at least twenty-five cities, all of which they wanted to
explore. On the day I visited, the team was unburying a city they called Huaricanga, after
a nearby hamlet. Here the Pan-American Highway had, as it turned out, sliced through
some of the oldest public architecture anywhere on earth.
“You mean to tell me there’s no dental picks at all?” Haas was saying. “All these
people and not one has a dental pick? I’d really like a pick for this thing.”
“Nobody can find one,” Creamer said. She left to supervise the second part of the
dig, two hundred yards away, on the other side of the highway.
Haas sighed, pushed back his wide-brimmed straw hat, and leaned into the dirt
with jackknife and paintbrush. Despite the low clouds—an almost featureless carpet a
thousand feet above our heads—perspiration stippled his temples. With Ruiz
documenting the work with a digital camera, Haas silently plucked out dead insects, bits
of leaf, and lengths of shicra, a kind of thick twine made from reeds. When he had
cleared enough, he sat back and stared at the now-exposed object. “I have no idea what
this is,” he announced. “Got any tweezers?” Ruiz produced a caliper-sized pair from his
backpack.
“Bravo,” Haas said. “We have tweezers.”
Although the Huaricanga mound resembled an ancient sandhill, the soft, shifting,
slightly gritty surface was not sand but the fine, windblown soil geologists call “loess.”
Fertile stuff, if it can somehow be irrigated, the loess blanketed the underlying structure
like a heavy tarpaulin tossed over a piece of machinery. Here and there the archaeologists
had scooped it away to reveal granite walls that had once been smoothly plastered. Over
time, weather and earthquakes and perhaps human malice had buckled most of the walls,
but their overall layout had been preserved. Behind them the team had removed some of
the fill: bags of stones, created by knotting shicra into mesh sacks, filling the sacks with
chunks of granite, and laying the results like fifty-pound bricks in the foundation.
Moving slowly, Haas tweezered out the pieces—they looked like the remnants of
a serving platter—and passed them to Ruiz, who dropped them into a resealable plastic
bag.
“Are all of those from a single object?” I asked.
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“I’d guess so, but your guess is good as mine,” Haas said. With his wide face,
gray goatee, and merry smile, he resembled, for the moment, an aging folk singer. “All I
can say is, this is really strange.”
Almost twenty people were working on the Huaricanga mound, shoveling away
the obscuring loess. Half of them were local workers; Peru has so many ruins from so
many cultures that in many small towns archaeological labor is a flourishing blue-collar
trade. The others were graduate students from Peru and the United States. After two days
of labor, workers and students were halfway through clearing off the top platform and the
staircases leading to it; the layout of the structure was visible enough to map. The temple,
for the mound was surely built for religious reasons, was laid out in a wide, shallow U
about 150 feet long and 60 feet high, with a sunken plaza between the arms. In its day its
grandeur would have overwhelmed the visitor. Little wonder: at the time of its
construction, the Huaricanga temple was among the world’s biggest buildings.
In college I read a one-volume history of the world by the distinguished historian
William H. McNeill. Called, simply enough, A World History, and published in 1967, it
began with what McNeill and most other historians then considered the four wellsprings
of human civilization: the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, in modern Iraq, home of Sumer,
oldest of all complex polities; the Nile Delta, in Egypt; the Indus Valley, in Pakistan; and,
in east central China, the valley of the Huang He, more familiar to Westerners as the
Yellow River. If McNeill were writing A World History today, discoveries like those at
Huaricanga would force him to add two more areas to the book. The first and better
known is Mesoamerica, where half a dozen societies, the Olmec first among them, rose in
the centuries before Christ. The second is the Peruvian littoral, home of a much older
*18
civilization that has come to light only in the twenty-first century.
Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had
only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the
inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic
to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes
(except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner
plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of
the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having secured their food
supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a
comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics,
including the zero.
A few decades ago, many researchers would have included jump-starting Andean
civilization on the honor roll of Mesoamerican accomplishments. The Olmec, it was
proposed, visited Peru, and the locals, dutiful students, copied their example. Today we
know that technologically sophisticated societies arose in Peru first—the starting date, to
archaeologists’ surprise, keeps getting pushed back. Between 3200 and 2500 B.C.,
large-scale public buildings, the temple at Huaricanga among them, rose up in at least
seven settlements on the Peruvian coast—an extraordinary efflorescence for that time and
place. When the people of the Norte Chico were building these cities, there was only one
other urban complex on earth: Sumer.
In the last chapter, I described how archaeologists have spent the last century
pushing back their estimates of when Indians were first present in the Americas. Now I
turn to a parallel intellectual journey: the growth in understanding of the antiquity,
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diversity, complexity, and technological sophistication of Indian societies. Much as
historians of early Eurasia focus on the Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Huang He
Valleys, historians of the Americas focus on Mesoamerica and the Andes.
Like the Eurasian centers of civilization, Mesoamerica and the Andes were places
where complex, long-lasting cultural traditions began. But there was a striking difference
between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres: the degree of interaction between their
great cultural centers. A constant traffic in goods and ideas among Eurasian societies
allowed them to borrow or steal each other’s most interesting innovations: algebra from
Islam, paper from China, the spinning wheel (probably) from India, the telescope from
Europe. “In my lectures, I put this very baldly,” Alfred Crosby told me. “I say that
nobody in Europe or Asia ever invented anything—they got it from somebody else.” He
added, “When you think of the dozen most important things ever invented—the wheel,
the alphabet, the stirrup, metallurgy—none of them were invented in Europe. But they all
got used there.”
By contrast, there was very little exchange of people, goods, or ideas between
Mesoamerica and the Andes. Travelers on the Silk Road between China and the
Mediterranean had to cross desert and the Hindu Kush, both formidable obstacles. But
there was no road whatsoever across the two thousand miles of jagged mountains and
thick rainforest between Mesoamerica and the Andes. In fact, there still isn’t any road.
The section of the Pan-American Highway that runs between them remains unfinished,
because engineers can neither go around nor bulldoze through the swamps and mountains
at the narrow Panama-Colombia border. Almost entirely by themselves for thousands of
years, these two centers of civilization were so different that researchers today have
difficulty finding a conceptual vocabulary that applies to both. Nonetheless, the tale of
their mostly separate progress through time deserves prominent placement in any history
of the world.
THE COTTON AGE
Peru is the cow-catcher on the train of continental drift. Leading South America’s
slow, grinding march toward Australia, its coastline hits the ocean floor and crumples up
like a carpet shoved into a chair-leg. Just offshore the impact pushes the plate on the
bottom of the Pacific down and under the advancing coast, creating a trench almost five
miles deep. Inland the impact thrusts up the two parallel mountain ranges that make up
the Peruvian Andes: the high Cordillera Negra, the Black Range, to the west, and the still
higher Cordillera Blanca, the White Range, to the east. (The White Range has snow; the
Black rarely does. Hence the names.) In northern Peru a third range rises between them;
the altiplano, a scoop of high plains some five hundred miles long, fills the gap in the
south. Taken together, the cordilleras and the altiplano make up the Andes, the
second-biggest chain of mountains in the world.
Sandwiched between the Andes and the Pacific, Peru’s coastland is a skinny
gray-brown ribbon. From a geographer’s point of view, it is a splendid anomaly,
commencing with its extreme aridity. Over most of the South American landmass, the
prevailing winds come from the east, across Brazil. As the warm, wet Amazonian air hits
the towering Andes, it cools and sheds its moisture in the form of snow. Almost nothing
is left for the Peruvian coast, which sits in the mountains’ rain shadow. Surprisingly, the
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coast is also walled off from moisture on the Pacific side, where the trade winds create a
second rain shadow. Blowing from the southwest, the trades push the warm surface
waters northeast, pulling frigid water from the deep offshore trench to the surface. The
upwelling, known as the Humboldt Current, chills the air above it. Coming from the west,
the Pacific trade winds hit the cold air from the Humboldt Current and are forced upward
in a classic temperature inversion of the sort common in southern California. In
temperature inversions, air movement is inhibited—the cold air can’t rise and the warm
air doesn’t fall—which in turn inhibits rainfall. Walled off from wet air by both the
Andes and the Humboldt Current, the Peruvian littoral is astonishingly dry: the average
annual precipitation is about two inches. The Atacama Desert, just south of Peru on the
Chilean shore, is the driest place on earth—in some places rain has literally never been
recorded. Space researchers use the Atacama as a model for the sands of Mars.
Pizarro’s pilot once explained how to navigate from Mexico’s Pacific shore to
Peru: Sail south along the coast until you no longer see trees. Then you are in Peru. Yet
the coast is not a classic, Sahara-style desert of sand dunes and scorching sun. It is
punctuated by more than fifty rivers, which channel Andes snowmelt to the sea. The lines
of vegetation along their banks are like oases, fertile places where people can farm in an
otherwise almost lifeless land. For much of the year the ocean air is cold enough on
winter mornings to make fog roll into the valleys a hundred feet deep. People wear
sweatshirts and futilely wipe at the mist on their windshields. By noon the fog lifts,
having deposited a few hundredths of an inch of moisture (summed over the year, the fog
gives the desert most of its annual two inches of precipitation).
If the anti-Clovis arguments are correct, paleo-Indians walked or paddled to Peru
fifteen thousand years ago or more. But Peru’s first known inhabitants appear in the
archaeological record sometime before 10,000 B.C. According to two studies in Science
in 1998, these people apparently lived part of the year in the foothills, gathering and
hunting (for the latter, no traces of Clovis points have been found). When winter came,
they hiked to the warmer coast. At Quebrada Jaguay, a dry streambed on the nation’s
southern coast that was one of the two sites described in Science, they dug up wedge
clams and chased schools of six-inch drumfish with nets. They carried their catch to their
base, which was about five miles from the shore. (Quebrada means “ravine” and often
refers to the gullies caused by flash floods.) Quebrada Tacahuay, the other Science site,
was closer to the shore but even drier: its average annual rainfall is less than a quarter
inch. The site, exposed by the construction of a road, is an avian graveyard. On their
annual travels between the foothills and the shore, paleo-Indians seem to have visited the
area periodically to feast on the cormorants and boobies that nested on the rocks by the
beach.
By 8000 B.C., paleo-Indians had radiated throughout western South America.
Their lives were similar enough to contemporary hunter-gatherers that perhaps they
should now be simply called Indians. Whatever the name, they were varied enough to
have pleased Walt Whitman. Some groups had settled into mountain caves, skewering
deer-size vicuña on spears; others plucked fish from mangrove swamps; still others
stayed on the beach as their forebears had, weaving nets and setting them into the water.
In the parched Atacama Desert, the Chinchorro created history’s first mummies.
Mummies were first discovered in the Atacama at the beginning of the twentieth
century. But the Chinchorro attracted sustained attention only in 1983, when ninety-six
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superbly preserved cadavers were discovered beneath a massif that rises above downtown
Arica, Chile. About 90 percent of their diet was seafood—fish, shellfish, marine
mammals, and seaweed—the Chinchorro ate almost no fruit, vegetables, or land animals.
Sometime before 5000 B.C. they began mummifying bodies—children at first, adults
later on. Nobody knows why. They peeled off the skin from the limbs like so many
socks, covered the result with white clay, painted it to resemble the deceased, and fitted
the head with a wig made from its own hair. Such was the skill of the Chinchorro at
preserving human flesh that scientists have been able to extract intact DNA from
cadavers thousands of years older than the Egyptian pyramids.
Many of the child mummies exhibit signs of severe anemia, surprising in people
who lived on seafood. In the preserved cadavers paleoparasitologists (scientists who
study ancient parasites) have discovered eggs from Diphyllobothrium pacificum, a marine
tapeworm that usually afflicts fish and sea lions but can slip into human beings who eat
raw seafood. The parasite clamps onto the intestines and siphons nutrients from the body.
Some grow to lengths of sixteen feet. If the tapeworm attaches to the right place in the
gut, it can leech vitamin B 12 from the victim, instigating a lethal form of anemia. The
Chinchorro, it seems, were beset by parasites.
The Chinchorro mummies were often repainted, indicating that they were not
quickly interred but kept on display, perhaps for years. One can speculate that grieving
parents were unable to let go of their children’s bodies in a society that viewed the spirit
as adhering to the flesh. What is certain is that the Chinchorro mummies are the first
known manifestation of a phenomenon that marked Andean society all the way up to the
Inka: the belief that the venerated, preserved dead could exert a powerful impact on the
living.
Sometime before 3200 B.C., and possibly before 3500 B.C., something happened
in the Norte Chico. On a world level, the eruption at the Norte Chico was improbable,
even aberrant. The Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Huang He Valleys were fertile,
sunny, well-watered breadbaskets with long stretches of bottomland that practically
invited farmers to stick seeds in the soil. Because intensive agriculture has been regarded
a prerequisite for complex societies, it has long been claimed that civilizations can arise
only in such farm-friendly places. The Peruvian littoral is an agronomical no-go zone:
barren, cloudy, almost devoid of rain, seismically and climatically unstable. Except along
the rivers, nothing grows but lichen. “It looks like the last place you’d want to start up
something major,” Creamer said to me. “There doesn’t seem to be anything there to build
it on.”
Nonetheless, they built it. “The complex of sites in the Norte Chico region is
nothing short of extraordinary,” Haas and Creamer wrote in 2005.
While a very small number of moderate sites with communal architecture…are
found in other parts of the Andes, the concentration of at least 25 large
ceremonial/residential sites in the valleys of the Norte Chico is unique. Metaphorically,
most of the Andes is covered with granules of sand [between 3000 B.C. and 1800 B.C.].
In a few spots, there are anthills that clearly stand out from the loose granules. Then in
the Norte Chico, there is a volcano.
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The Norte Chico consists of four narrow river valleys: from south to north, the
Huaura, Supe, Pativilca, and Fortaleza. They converge on a slice of coastline less than
thirty miles long. The first full-scale archaeological investigation of the area took place in
1941, when Gordon R. Willey and John M. Corbett of Harvard worked at Aspero, a salt
marsh at the mouth of the Supe. They found a big trash heap and a multiroomed building
with no pottery and a few maize cobs under the pounded clay floor. They didn’t know
what to make of it. Why was there no pottery, when all previously examined large
settlements in Peru had pottery? Why only a handful of maize cobs in the whole site,
when maize, at least for the elite, was a staple food? How did they grow maize in a salt
marsh, anyway? How could they have agriculture but no pottery? Working before the
invention of carbon dating, they had no way to determine Aspero’s age. The puzzled
archaeologists took thirteen years to publish their data.
Indian cities in Peru are some of the most heavily looted archaeological sites in
the world. The looting dates back millennia, with the Inka having ravaged the centers of
their predecessors, sometimes reusing art and stonework. The Spanish sack of
Tawantinsuyu calamitously expanded on this tradition of plunder, which has greatly
accelerated in modern times, fueled by the desperate poverty of Peru’s Indian population.
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Here in the Fortaleza Valley, graverobbers—almost certainly local farmers—have ripped
apart thousand-year-old tombs in a futile search for golden artifacts. Others gathered the
remains into shrines for secretive, candlelit prayers to the dead, whose powers are
recognized by alcohol and cigarettes.
Among Aspero’s many curiosities, Willey and Corbett noted, were a half-dozen
mounds, some of them nearly fifteen feet tall. These “knolls, or hillocks,” the two men
wrote, were “natural eminences of sand.” Thirty years after his initial excavation, Willey
revisited Aspero with Michael E. Moseley, an archaeologist now at the University of
Florida. To his chagrin, Willey quickly recognized that the natural “knolls” were, in truth,
human-made “temple-type platform mounds,” evidence of a more materially advanced
culture than he had imagined possible for the era. Indeed, Aspero may have had as many
as seventeen artificial mounds, all of which Willey missed the first time round. “It is an
excellent, if embarrassing, example,” he remarked, “of not being able to find what you
are not looking for.”
At about the same time, one of Moseley’s graduate students wrote his doctoral
dissertation about Aspero. He had enough grant money to pay for seven radiocarbon
dates. According to one of them, Aspero went back to 3000 B.C. The student also had a
smaller, nearby site called As8 tested and got a date of 4900 B.C. Ridiculous, he in effect
thought. These dates are too old—obviously something went wrong. Maybe the samples
were contaminated. And he tossed the dates out.
That may have been a mistake. In 1994 Ruth Shady Solis, of the National
University of San Marcos in Lima, began working fourteen miles inland from Aspero, at
a site known as Caral. From the sandy soil emerged an imposing, 150-acre array of
earthworks: six large platform mounds, one sixty feet tall and five hundred feet on a side;
two round, sunken ceremonial plazas; half a dozen complexes of mounds and platforms;
big stone buildings with residential apartments. Haas and Creamer worked with the
project in 2000 and helped establish Caral’s antiquity: it was founded before 2600 B.C.
While Shady continued work on Caral, Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz split off to investigate
the Pitivilca, the next river to the north, and the Fortaleza, just north of the Pitivilca. They
found, Haas told me, “major urban centers on a par with Caral in terms of monumental
architecture, ceremonial structures, and residential architecture. And some of them were
older.”
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NORTE CHICO
The Americas’ First Urban Complex, 3000–1800 B.C.
Examination of Huaricanga and the surrounding communities is far from
complete—Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz published their first findings in December 2004.
They found evidence of people living inland from the coast as early as 9210 B.C. But the
oldest date securely associated with a city is about 3500 B.C., at Huaricanga. (There are
hints of earlier dates.) Other urban sites followed apace: Caballete in 3100 B.C., Porvenir
and Upaca in 2700 B.C. Taken individually, none of the twenty-five Norte Chico cities
rivaled Sumer’s cities in size, but the totality was bigger than Sumer. Egypt’s pyramids
were larger, but they were built centuries later. I asked Haas and Creamer where a race of
alien visitors in, say, 3000 B.C. would have landed if they were searching for earth’s
most sophisticated society. “I hate questions like that,” Haas said, because they ask
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scientists to engage in the dubious enterprise of ranking cultures against each other on a
scale.
“Wouldn’t it depend on what the aliens thought was sophisticated?” Creamer
asked. “I mean, who knows what they would think.”
I asked them to indulge me.
“I know what you’re getting at,” Haas said, reluctantly. “In 3000 B.C. your aliens
would have had a very limited number of options on the menu. And one of those options
would have been the Norte Chico.”
Because human beings rarely volunteer to spend their days loading baskets with
heavy rocks to build public monuments, Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz argued that these cities
must have had a centralized government that instigated and directed the work. In the
Norte Chico, in other words, Homo sapiens experienced a phenomenon that at that time
had occurred only once before, in Mesopotamia: the emergence, for better or worse, of
leaders with enough prestige, influence, and hierarchical position to induce their subjects
to perform heavy labor. It was humankind’s second experiment with government.
“Where does government come from?” Haas asked. “What makes people decide
to surrender some of their personal liberty to it? What did they gain from it? Philosophers
have been asking this question for centuries. But archaeology should have something to
contribute. In the Norte Chico, we may be able to provide some answers. It’s one of only
two places on earth—three, if you count Mesoamerica—where government was an
invention. Everywhere else it was inherited or borrowed. People were born into societies
with governments or saw their neighbors’ governments and copied the idea. Here, people
came up with it themselves.”
Haas’s enthusiasm seems hyperbolic to some of his colleagues. “What about
Amazonian chiefdoms, North American Mississippian societies, and so on?” James
Petersen, an archaeologist at the University of Vermont, asked me. “Plus Africa.
‘Government’ was independently invented there, too.” But Haas argues that these peoples
knew of the existence of hierarchical, structured societies with strong central leaders, and
could pattern their societies after them. Only in a very few places, he says, Norte Chico
among them, were cultures proceeding without a map.
In the Norte Chico, Haas told me, government seems not to have arisen from the
need for mutual defense, as philosophers have often speculated. The twenty-five cities
were not sited strategically and did not have defensive walls; no evidence of warfare,
such as burned buildings or mutilated corpses, has been found. Instead, he said, the basis
of the rulers’ power was the collective economic and spiritual good. Norte Chico was the
realm of King Cotton.
To feed Norte Chico’s burgeoning population, Shady discovered, the valley folk
learned how to irrigate the soil. Not given an environment that favored the development
of intensive agriculture, that is, they shaped the landscape into something more suitable
to their purposes. Luckily for their purposes, the area is geographically suited for
irrigation. The peril of irrigation for farmers is evaporation. Just as water evaporating in a
glass leaves behind a film of salts and minerals, water evaporating from irrigation
channels leaves deposits in the soil. In a surprisingly short time, the salty deposits can
build up to toxic levels, making the land unusable. Because the Cordillera Negra bulges
especially close to the coast in the Norte Chico, the valleys are short and steeply walled;
almost hurled from the heights, the rivers shoot toward the sea at high velocity. Even
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after diversion, the water gushes through irrigation channels so quickly that it can’t
evaporate and build up salts in the soil. To this day, one can only reach many
archaeological sites in the Norte Chico by navigating around surging, brimfull irrigation
ditches, some of them probably laid out originally by the same farmers who built the
mounds.
The most important product of irrigation was cotton. Almost forty species of
cotton exist worldwide, of which four have been domesticated, two in the Americas, two
in the Middle East and South Asia. Cotton was known in Europe by the thirteenth century
but not common until the eighteenth; Columbus and his men wore sturdy flax and coarse
wool.
*19 South American cotton (Gossypium barbadense) once grew wild along the
continent’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts. It may first have been domesticated in Amazonia,
presumably near the river’s mouth. Today it has been supplanted by Mexican cotton
(another species, Gossypium hirsutum), which provides most of the world’s harvest. But
in the Andean past, the long, puffy bolls of South American cotton, some varieties
naturally tinted pink, blue, or yellow, were the soft underpinning of Andean culture. “In
the Norte Chico we see almost no visual arts,” Ruiz told me after I gave him the scrap of
cloth. “No sculpture, no carving or bas-relief, almost no painting or drawing—the
interiors are completely bare. What we do see are these huge mounds—and textiles.”
Cotton was a key element in regional trade. People in shoreline settlements like
Aspero could catch vast quantities of anchovies and sardines; Caral, Huaricanga, and the
other inland towns had irrigation-produced cotton, fruit, and vegetables. The countless
fish bones in inland Caral and Huaricanga and the fruit seeds and cotton nets in shoreline
Aspero are evidence that they swapped one for the other. According to Haas, the inland
centers must have controlled the exchange, because the fishers needed their cotton for
nets. Cotton was both needed and easily stored, which made it useful as a medium of
exchange or status. At Upaca, on the Pativilca, Haas’s team discovered the ruins of stone
warehouses. If they were for storing cotton, as Haas surmises, they would have been, in
this textile-mad society, an emblem of state power and wealth, the ancient equivalent of
Fort Knox.
By making these claims, Haas and Creamer were staking out a position in a
long-running theoretical dispute. In 1975 Michael Moseley, the Florida archaeologist,
drew together his own work in Aspero and earlier research by Peruvian and other
researchers into what has been called the MFAC hypothesis: the maritime foundations of
Andean civilization. He proposed that there was little subsistence agriculture around
Aspero because it was a center of fishing, and that the later, highland Peruvian cultures,
including the mighty Inka, all had their origins not in the mountains but in the great
fishery of the Humboldt Current. Rather than being founded on agriculture, the ancient
cities of coastal Peru drew their sustenance from the sea.
The MFAC hypothesis—that societies fed by fishing could have founded a
civilization—was “radical, unwelcome, and critiqued as an economic impossibility,”
Moseley later recalled. Little wonder! The MFAC was like a brick through the window of
archaeological theory. Archaeologists had always believed that in fundamental respects
all human societies everywhere were alike, no matter how different they might appear on
the surface. If one runs the tape backwards to the beginning, so to speak, the stories are
all the same: foraging societies develop agriculture; the increased food supply leads to a
population boom; the society grows and stratifies, with powerful clerics at the top and
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peasant cultivators at the bottom; massive public works ensue, along with intermittent
social strife and war. If the MFAC hypothesis was true, early civilization in Peru was in
one major respect strikingly unlike early civilization in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and
China. Farming, the cornerstone of the complex societies in the rest of the world, was in
Peru an afterthought. (In Chapter 1, I called Peru the site of an independent Neolithic
Revolution, which I defined, following archaeological practice, as beginning with the
invention of agriculture. If the MFAC is correct, the definition will have to be changed.)
The MFAC hypothesis was radical, its supporters conceded, but the supporting
evidence could not be dismissed. Bone analyses show that late-Pleistocene coastal
foragers “got 90 percent of their protein from the sea—anchovies, sardines, shellfish, and
so on,” said Susan deFrance, an archaeologist at the University of Florida. And the
pattern continued for thousands of years and archaeological dig after archaeological dig.
“Later sites like Aspero are just full of fish bones and show almost no evidence of food
crops.” The MFAC hypothesis, she told me, can be summarized as the belief “that these
huge numbers of anchovy bones are telling you something.” That “something” is that,
according to Daniel H. Sandweiss of the University of Maine, “the incredibly rich ocean
off this incredibly impoverished coast was the critical factor.”
Further evidence both for and against the MFAC hypothesis emerged in the
mid-1990s, with Shady’s pathbreaking work on the Supe River. (Aspero, one recalls, sat
at the river’s mouth.) Shady’s team uncovered seventeen riverside settlements, the
second-biggest of which was Caral. In her view, monumental buildings implied a large
resident population, but again there were plenty of anchovy bones and little evidence that
locals farmed anything but cotton. To Moseley, the fish bones suggested that the ample
protein on the coast allowed people to go inland and build irrigation networks to produce
the cotton needed to expand fishing production. The need for nets, in Haas’s view, gave
the inland cities the whip hand—Norte Chico was based on farming, like all other
complex societies, although not on farming for food. Besides, he says, so many more
people lived along the four rivers than on the shore that they had to have been dominant.
Moseley believes that Aspero, which has never been fully excavated, is older than the
other cities, and set the template for them. “For archaeology,” deFrance said, “what may
be important” in the end is not the scope of the society “but where it emerged from and
the food supply. You can’t eat cotton.” Evidence one way or the other may emerge if
Moseley and Shady, as planned, return to Aspero. If they are correct, and Aspero turns
out to be substantially older than now thought, it might win the title of the world’s oldest
city—the place where human civilization began. “Maybe we might actually stop people
calling it the ‘New World,’” Moseley joked.
Norte Chico chiefdoms were almost certainly theocratic, though not brutally so;
leaders induced followers to obey by a combination of ideology, charisma, and skillfully
timed positive reinforcement. Scattered almost randomly around the top of the mounds
are burned, oxidized chunks of rock—hearth stones—in drifts of fish bones and ash. To
Haas and Creamer, these look like the remains of feasts. The city rulers encouraged and
rewarded the workforce during construction and maintenance of the mound by staging
celebratory roasts of fish and achira root right on the worksite. Afterward they mixed the
garbage into the mound, incorporating the celebration into the construction. At these
feasts, alcohol in some form was almost certainly featured. So, perhaps, was music, both
vocal and instrumental; excavating Caral, Shady discovered thirty-two flutes made of
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pelican wingbones tucked into a recess in the main temple.
What was it like building these first great structures? In June 1790, a year after the
French Revolution swept away a corrupt and ineffectual monarchy, thousands of
Parisians from every social class united to create the enormous Champ de Mars as a
monument to the new society. Working in heavy rainfall without coercion or pay, they
dug out the entire enormous space to a depth of four feet and then filled it up with enough
sand and gravel to make an outdoor amphitheater suitable for half a million people. The
whole huge effort took only three weeks. Something analogous—an awed, wondering
celebration of a new mode of existence—may have occurred at the Norte Chico.
Even today, the contrast is startling between the desert and the irrigated land, with
its lush patchwork of maize, sugar, and fruit trees. Beyond the reach of the water the
barrens instantly commence; the line of demarcation is sharp enough to cross with a step.
To people born into a landscape of rock and fog, the conflagration of green must have
been a dazzlement. Of course they would exalt the priests and rulers who promised to
maintain this miracle. The prospect of a drunken feast afterward would be a bonus.
The only known trace of the Norte Chico deities may be a drawing etched into the
face of a gourd. It depicts a sharp-toothed, hat-wearing figure who faces the viewer
frontally and holds a long stick or rod vertically in each hand. When Creamer found the
gourd in 2002, the image shocked Andeanists. It looked like an early version of the Staff
God, a fanged, staff-wielding deity who is one of the main characters in the Andean
pantheon. Previously the earliest manifestation of the Staff God had been thought to be
around 500 B.C. According to radiocarbon tests, the Norte Chico gourd was harvested
between 2280 and 2180 B.C. The early date implies, Haas and Creamer argued, that the
principal Andean spiritual tradition originated in the Norte Chico, and that this tradition
endured for at least four thousand years, millennia longer than had been previously
suspected.
A recently discovered etched drawing on a gourd (left) has led some researchers
to posit that the fanged Staff God was a central figure in an Andean religious tradition
that lasted almost four thousand years. (Right, a Staff God from the first millennium
A.D.)
Many researchers reacted skeptically to the finding. According to Krzysztof
Makowski, an archaeologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima, the
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image is so anomalous—Creamer found it in a strata dating between 900 and 1300
A.D.—that a more likely explanation is that the figure was carved onto an ancient gourd
that had been preserved by the extremely arid climate. Such reuse of old materials is not
unknown, though nobody has ever seen it with a gourd three thousand years old. More
important, Makowski says, researchers have little evidence that ancient Peruvians
actually believed in a single overarching deity called the Staff God. “What we describe as
the ‘Staff God’ is a convention,” he explained to me, a standardized pose reminiscent in
its way of the standardized poses in Byzantine art. The religious tradition of Peru, in his
view, was an overlapping sequence of related faiths that has barely begun to be
unraveled; it is as if archaeologists from the far future were excavating in Europe, and
mulling over the ubiquitous image of the man on the cross. Was this one man? Many men
depicted in a similar fashion? One man whose meaning changed over time?
What is known is that the tradition evolved, as religions will, with the
circumstances of its believers. As Andean societies grew richer, their temples and the
images in them grew grander and more refined, though the former stayed true to the
U-shape-and-sunken-plaza pattern I saw in the Norte Chico and the latter, depicted often
in the “Staff God” pose, never lost their erect postures, gnashing fangs, and brandished
staffs. Over the millennia, this god or gods transmuted into Wiraqocha, the Inka creator
deity, whose worship was brutally suppressed by Spain.
Whether on the coast or in the river valleys, Moseley said, the Norte Chico lighted
a cultural fire. During the next three thousand years, Peru hosted so many diverse cultures
that the archaeological timelines in textbooks, with their multiple arrows and
switchbacks, are as impenetrable as the family trees of European kings. Despite their
variousness, Haas says, all seem to have drawn in their diverse ways from the well of
Norte Chico. Characterizing the similarities is as difficult as nailing down a blob of
mercury, because exceptions abound and human behavior is always multifaceted.
Nonetheless, visitors to Andean history note certain ways of doing things that recur in
ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one variant, sometimes in another, like the
themes in a jazz improvisation. The primacy of exchange over a wide area, the penchant
for collective, festive civic work projects, the high valuation of textiles and textile
technology—Norte Chico, it seems possible to say, set the template for all of them.
And only Norte Chico. For the next four thousand years, Andean civilization was
influenced by only one major import from the world outside: maize. A few other minor
crops made the trip later, including tobacco, domesticated in Amazonia, then exported
north to become the favorite vice of Indians from Mesoamerica to Maine. But it is a mark
of maize’s social, cultural, and even political centrality that it was the first—and for
centuries the only—phenomenon to pass from Mexico to the Andes. The next major
import, alas, was smallpox.
TINY COBS
Although it was just after dawn, several people were already waiting outside the
small store. When the metal grating rolled up, I followed them inside. The shop was in a
middle-class neighborhood of Oaxaca city, in southern Mexico. Behind the low counter,
half a dozen women hovered over waist-high stoves made of concrete block. Recessed
into the dome-shaped top of each stove were two shallow clay dishes that served as
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urners. With expert motions the women slipped tortillas—thin discs of cream-colored
flour perhaps nine inches in diameter—onto the hot burners. In seconds the tortilla dried
and puffed up like a soufflé. And from the storefront floated the aroma of toasting maize,
which has permeated Mexico and Central America for thousands of years.
Established in 2001, the tortilla store is an innovative attempt to preserve one of
earth’s greatest cultural and biological assets: the many local varieties of maize in the
narrow “waist” of southern Mexico. The isthmus is a medley of mountains, beaches, wet
tropical forests, and dry savannas, and is the most ecologically diverse area in
Mesoamerica. “Some parts of Oaxaca go up nine thousand feet,” T. Boone Hallberg, a
botanist at the Oaxaca Institute of Technology, told me. “Other parts are at sea level.
Sometimes the soil is very acid, sometimes it’s quite basic—all within a few hundred
feet. You can go on either side of a highway, and the climate will be different on the east
side than on the west side.” The area’s human geography is equally diverse: it is the
home of more than a dozen major Indian groups, who have a long and fractious history.
Despite the strife among them, all of them played a role in the region’s greatest
achievement, the development of Mesoamerican agriculture, arguably the world’s most
ecologically savvy form of farming, and of its centerpiece, Zea mays, the crop known to
agronomists as maize.
I was visiting Amado Ramírez Leyva, the entrepreneur behind the tortilla store.
Born in Oaxaca and trained as an agronomist, Ramírez Leyva had established a
consortium of traditional farmers, Indians like himself (Ramírez Leyva is Ñudzahui
[Mixtec], the second most numerous Indian group in the region). The farmers supply
eight different varieties of dried maize to his shop, Itanoní, where the kernels are
carefully ground, hand-pressed into tortillas, and cooked fresh for customers. Itanoní
means “maize flower” in Ñudzahui, and refers to a flower that blooms in maize fields. It
is one of the few tortillerías in Mexico—perhaps even the only one—to sell what might
be described as “estate” tortillas: proudly labeled as being made from maize of one
variety, from one area.
“Everyone in Mexico knows the rules for making a true tortilla,” Ramírez Leyva
told me. “But you can’t get them that way now, except maybe in your grandmother’s
kitchen.” First soak the dried maize kernels in a bath of lime and water to remove their
thin, translucent skins (a process with its own special verb, nixtamalizar). Then
stone-grind the kernels into masa, a light, slightly sticky paste with a distinct maize
fragrance. Made without salt, spices, leavening, or preservatives, masa must be cooked
within a few hours of being ground, and the tortilla should be eaten soon after it is
cooked. Hot is best, perhaps folded over with mushrooms or cheese in a tlacoyo. Like a
glass of wine, he said, a tortilla should carry the flavor of its native place. “You want to
try some?”
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A gourmet tortilla shop in Oaxaca, Itanoní is an attempt to preserve southern
Mexico’s hundreds of varieties of maize, a Mesoamerican tradition that has survived for
thousands of years.
I did. The smells in the shop—dry-toasted maize, melting farm cheese, squash
flowers sautéing in home-pressed oil—were causing my stomach to direct urgent
messages to my brain.
Ramírez Leyva gave me a plateful of tlacoyos. “This is exactly what you would
have eaten here ten thousand years ago,” he said.
In his enthusiasm, he was overstating, but not by much. Indians didn’t have
cheese, for one thing. And they didn’t eat tortillas ten thousand years ago, though tortillas
are indeed ancient. It is known that 11,500 years ago paleo-Indians were hunting from
caves in what is now Puebla, the state northwest of Oaxaca. These were not mastodon
and mammoth hunters—both species were already extinct. Instead they preyed on deer,
horse, antelope, jackrabbit, and, now and then, giant turtle, as well as several species of
rodent. Within the next two thousand years all of these animals except deer vanished, too,
done in either by a local variant of overkill, the onset of hotter, drier conditions that
shrank the available grassland, or both. Responding to the lack of game, people in
Oaxaca and Puebla focused more on gathering. Shifting among productive locations,
individual families, living on their own, ate seeds and fruit during the spring and fall and
hunted during the winter. During the summer they joined together in bands of twenty-five
to thirty—cactus leaves, a local favorite, were plentiful enough in that season to support
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larger groups.
All the while their store of knowledge about the environment increased. People
learned how to make agave plants edible (roast them), how to remove the tannic acid
from acorns (grind them to a powder, then soak), how to make tongs to pick spiny cactus
fruit, how to find wild squash flowers in the undergrowth, and other useful things. Along
the way, perhaps, they noticed that seeds thrown in the garbage one year would sprout
spontaneously in the next. The sum of these questions led to full-fledged agriculture—not
just in the Tehuacán Valley, but in many places in southern Mexico. Squashes, gourds,
peppers, and chupandilla plums were among the initial crops. The first cereal was
probably millet—not the millet eaten today, which originated in Africa, but a cousin
species, knotweed bristle-grass, which is no longer farmed. And then came maize.
At the DNA level, all the major cereals—wheat, rice, maize, millet, barley, and so
on—are surprisingly alike. But despite their genetic similarity, maize looks and acts
different from the rest. It is like the one redheaded early riser in a family of dark-haired
night owls. Left untended, other cereals are capable of propagating themselves. Because
maize kernels are wrapped inside a tough husk, human beings must sow the species—it
essentially cannot reproduce on its own. The uncultivated ancestors of other cereals
resemble their domesticated descendants. People can and do eat their grain; in the Middle
East, for example, the wild barley harvest from a small piece of land can feed a family.
By contrast, no wild maize ancestor has ever been found, despite decades of search.
Maize’s closest relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks nothing like it
(teosinte splits into many thin stems, whereas maize has a single thick stalk). And
teosinte, unlike wild wheat and rice, is not a practical food source; its “ears” are scarcely
an inch long and consist of seven to twelve hard, woody seeds. An entire ear of teosinte
has less nutritional value than a single kernel of modern maize.
The grain in wild grasses develops near the top of the stem. As it matures, the
stem slowly breaks up—shatters, in the jargon—letting the seed dribble to the ground. In
wild wheat and barley, a common single-gene mutation blocks shattering. For the plant
the change is highly disadvantageous, but it facilitates harvest by humans—the grain
waits on the stem to be collected. The discovery and planting of nonshattering grain is
thought to have precipitated the Neolithic revolution in the Middle East. Like other
grasses, teosinte shatters, but there is no known nonshattering variant. (At least sixteen
genes control teosinte and maize shattering, a situation so complex that geneticists have
effectively thrown up their hands after trying to explain how a nonshattering type might
have appeared spontaneously.) No known wild ancestor, no obvious natural way to
evolve a nonshattering variant, no way to propagate itself—little wonder that the
Mexican National Museum of Culture claimed in a 1982 exhibition that maize “was not
domesticated, but created”—almost from scratch.
In the 1960s Richard S. MacNeish, of Phillips Academy, in Andover,
Massachusetts, led an archaeological team that meticulously combed Puebla’s Tehuacán
Valley for signs of early agriculture. Like the Peruvian littoral, the Tehuacán Valley lies
in a double rain shadow, sandwiched between two mountain ranges. The aridity similarly
helps preserve archaeological evidence. MacNeish’s team sifted through fifty caves
before they found anything. In site No. 50, a rockshelter near the village of Coxcatlán, the
team found maize cobs the size of a cigarette butt.
Ultimately, MacNeish’s team found 23,607 whole or partial maize cobs in five
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caves in the Tehuacán Valley. This ancient refuse became ammunition in a long-running
academic battle between Harvard botanist Paul C. Mangelsdorf and George Beadle, a
geneticist who worked at Stanford, Caltech, and the University of Chicago. In the late
1930s both men proposed theories about the origin of maize. Mangelsdorf said that it
descended from the mix of a now-vanished wild ancestor of maize and wild grasses from
the genus Tripsacum. Teosinte, he said, played no role in its development. Beadle had a
simpler theory: maize was directly descended from teosinte. Mangelsdorf treated this idea
with disbelieving scorn. By now the reader will not be surprised to learn that an
apparently arcane debate about the distant past could become vehemently personal.
Relations between the two men became cold, then bitter, then explosive. Botanists chose
sides and wrote caustic letters about each other.
Mangelsdorf worked with MacNeish and classified the 23,607 ancient maize
cobs. The smallest and oldest, he proclaimed, were maize’s true wild ancestor, which
Indians had then crossed with Tripsacum to make modern maize. So powerful did the
evidence of Mangelsdorf’s tiny cobs seem that in the 1960s it buried the teosinte
hypothesis, even though the latter’s champion, Beadle, had for other research won a
Nobel Prize. Beadle’s ideas were taken up in revamped form by University of Wisconsin
botanist Hugh Iltis in 1970. Maize originated, Iltis postulated, in a strange, wholesale
mutation of teosinte, to which Indians added and subtracted features through intensive
breeding. Mangelsdorf’s side found itself on the defensive; Iltis had gleefully pointed out
that the “wild maize” cobs from the Tehuacán Valley were identical to those of an
unusual, fully domesticated variety of popcorn from Argentina. By then the dispute over
the origin of maize had filled almost as much paper—and became as acrimonious—as the
battle over Clovis.
In 1997 Mary W. Eubanks, a Duke University biologist, resuscitated the
hybridization theory in a new variant. Maize, she suggested, might have been created by
repeatedly crossing Zea diploperennis, a rare maize relative, and another cousin species,
Eastern gamagrass. When species from different genera hybridize, the result can be what
the biologist Barbara McClintock called “genomic shock,” a wholesale reordering of
DNA in which “new species can arise quite suddenly.” In Eubanks’s theory, Indians
came upon a chance combination of Zea diploperennis and gamagrass and realized that
by mixing these two species they could shape an entirely new biological entity. As proof,
she announced the creation of a Zea diploperennis–gamagrass hybrid in the laboratory
that displayed the attributes of ancient maize.
The teosinte faction remained skeptical. A consortium of twelve maize scientists
harshly attacked Eubanks’s work in 2001 for, in their view, failing to demonstrate that
her hybrid was actually a Zea diploperennis–gamagrass mix and not an accidental blend
of Zea diploperennis and modern maize. (Such errors are a constant threat; in a busy lab,
it is all too easy for biologists to use the wrong pollen, mislabel a tray, or mistake one
analysis for another.) Meanwhile other geneticists pinpointed teosinte mutations that
could have led to modern maize, including sugary 1, a variant gene that alters maize
starch in a way that gives tortillas the light, flaky texture celebrated at Itanoní.
Because maize is many steps removed from teosinte, these scientists argued that
the modern species had to have been consciously developed by a small group of breeders
who hunted through teosinte stands for plants with desired traits. Geneticists from
Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, estimated in 1998 that determined,
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aggressive, knowledgeable plant breeders—which Indians certainly were—might have
been able to breed maize in as little as a decade by seeking the right teosinte mutations.
From the historian’s point of view, the difference between the two models is
unimportant. In both, Indians took the first steps toward modern maize in southern
Mexico, probably in the highlands, more than six thousand years ago. Both argue that
modern maize was the outcome of a bold act of conscious biological
manipulation—“arguably man’s first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic
engineering,” Nina V. Federoff, a geneticist at Pennsylvania State University, wrote in
2003. Federoff’s description, which appeared in Science, intrigued me. It makes
twenty-first-century scientists sound like pikers, I said when I contacted her. “That’s
right,” she said. “To get corn out of teosinte is so—you couldn’t get a grant to do that
now, because it would sound so crazy.” She added, “Somebody who did that today would
get a Nobel Prize! If their lab didn’t get shut down by Greenpeace, I mean.”
To people accustomed to thinking of maize in terms of dark or light yellow
kernels of corn on the cob, the variety in Mexican maize is startling. Red, blue, yellow,
orange, black, pink, purple, creamy white, multicolored—the jumble of colors in
Mesoamerican maize reflects the region’s jumble of cultures and ecological zones. One
place may have maize with cobs the size of a baby’s hand and little red kernels no bigger
than grains of rice that turn into tiny puffs when popped; in another valley will be maize
with two-foot-long cobs with great puffy kernels that Mexicans float in soup like
croutons. “Every variety has its own special use,” Ramírez Leyva explained to me. “This
one is for holidays, this one makes tortillas, this one for niquatole [a kind of maize
gelatin], this one for tejate,” a cold drink in which maize flour, mamey pits, fermented
white cacao beans, and other ingredients are marinated in water overnight and then
sweetened and whipped to a froth. As a rule domesticated plants are less genetically
diverse than wild species, because breeders try to breed out characteristics they don’t
want. Maize is one of the few farm species that is more diverse than most wild plants.
More than fifty genetically distinguishable maize “landraces” have been identified
in Mexico, of which at least thirty are native to Oaxaca, according to Flavio Aragón
Cuevas, a maize researcher at the Oaxaca office of the National Institute for Forestry,
Agriculture, and Fisheries Research. A landrace is a family of local varieties, each of
which may have scores of “cultivars,” or cultivated varieties. As many as five thousand
cultivars may exist in Mesoamerica.
Maize is open pollinated—it scatters pollen far and wide. (Wheat and rice
discreetly pollinate themselves.) Because wind frequently blows pollen from one small
maize field onto another, varieties are constantly mixing. “Maize is terribly
promiscuous,” Hugo Perales, an agronomist at the think tank Ecosur, in Chiapas, told me.
Uncontrolled, open pollination would, over time, turn the species into a single, relatively
homogeneous entity. But it does not, because farmers carefully sort through the seed they
will sow in the next season and generally do not choose obvious hybrids. Thus there is
both a steady flow of genes among maize landraces and a force counteracting that flow.
“The varieties are not like islands, carefully apart,” Perales explained. “They are more
like gentle hills in a landscape—you see them, they are clearly present, but you cannot
specify precisely where they start.”
San Juan Chamula, a mountain town in central Chiapas, near the border with
Guatemala, is an example. Located outside the colonial city of San Cristóbal de Las
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Casas, it has a sixteenth-century church with a brilliant blue interior that is a popular
tourist destination. But beyond the souvenir kiosks in the cathedral square, most of the
44,000 inhabitants of Chamula scratch a living from the dry mountain slopes outside
town. Almost all are Tzotzil, a southwestern branch of the Maya; in 1995, the most recent
date for which census data are available, about 28,000 did not speak Spanish. According
to a survey by Perales, 85 percent of the farmers plant the same maize landraces as their
fathers, varieties that have been passed on and maintained for generations. The crop in
the field today is the sum of thousands of individual choices made by community
members in the past.
Landrace maize from Oaxaca
Indian farmers grow maize in what is called a milpa. The term means “maize
field,” but refers to something considerably more complex. A milpa is a field, usually but
not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including
maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet
potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume). In
nature, wild beans and squash often grow in the same field as teosinte, the beans using
the tall teosinte as a ladder to climb toward the sun; below ground, the beans’
nitrogen-fixing roots provide nutrients needed by teosinte. The milpa is an elaboration of
this natural situation, unlike ordinary farms, which involve single-crop expanses of a sort
rarely observed in unplowed landscapes.
Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary. Maize lacks
digestible niacin, the amino acids lysine and tryptophan, necessary to make proteins and
diets with too much maize can lead to protein deficiency and pellagra, a disease caused
by lack of niacin. Beans have both lysine and tryptophan, but not the amino acids
cysteine and methionine, which are provided by maize. As a result, beans and maize
make a nutritionally complete meal. Squashes, for their part, provide an array of
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vitamins; avocados, fats. The milpa, in the estimation of H. Garrison Wilkes, a maize
researcher at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, “is one of the most successful
human inventions ever created.”
Wilkes was referring to the ecological worries that beset modern agribusiness.
Because agricultural fields are less diverse than natural ecosystems, they cannot perform
all their functions. As a result, farm soils can rapidly become exhausted. In Europe and
Asia, farmers try to avoid stressing the soil by rotating crops; they may plant wheat one
year, legumes the next, and let the field lie fallow in the year following. But in many
places this only works for a while, or it is economically unfeasible not to use the land for
a year. Then farmers use artificial fertilizer, which at best is expensive, and at worst may
inflict long-term damage on the soil. No one knows how long the system can continue.
The milpa, by contrast, has a long record of success. “There are places in Mesoamerica
that have been continuously cultivated for four thousand years and are still productive,”
Wilkes told me. “The milpa is the only system that permits that kind of long-term use.”
Likely the milpa cannot be replicated on an industrial scale. But by studying its essential
features, researchers may be able to smooth the rough ecological edges of conventional
agriculture. “Mesoamerica still has much to teach us,” Wilkes said.
To Wilkes’s way of thinking, ancient Indian farming methods may be the cure for
some of modern agriculture’s ailments. Beginning in the 1950s, scientists developed
hybrid strains of wheat, rice, maize, and other crops that were vastly more productive
than traditional varieties. The combination of the new crops and the greatly increased use
of artificial fertilizer and irrigation led to the well-known Green Revolution. In many
ways, the Green Revolution was a tremendous boon; harvests in many poor countries
soared so fast that despite burgeoning populations the incidence of hunger fell
dramatically. Unfortunately, though, the new hybrids are almost always more vulnerable
to disease and insects than older varieties. In addition to being too costly for many small
farmers, the fertilizer and irrigation can, if used improperly, damage the soil. Worst,
perhaps, in the long run, the exuberant spread of the Green Revolution has pushed many
traditional cultivars toward extinction, which in turn reduces the genetic diversity of
crops. Wilkes believes that some or all of these difficulties may be resolved by
reproducing features of the milpa in a contemporary setting. If this occurs, it will be the
second time that the dissemination of Mesoamerican agricultural techniques will have
had an enormous cultural impact—the first time being, of course, when they originated.
From today’s vantage it is difficult to imagine the impact maize must have had in
southern Mexico at the beginning, but perhaps a comparison will help. “Almost pure
stands” of einkorn wheat covered “dozens of square kilometers” in Turkey, Iraq, Syria,
and other parts of the Middle East, according to Jack R. Harlan and Daniel Zohary, two
agronomists who pored over the area in the 1960s to determine the distribution of wild
cereals. “Over many thousands of hectares” in those countries, they wrote in Science, “it
would be possible to harvest wild wheat today from natural stands almost as dense as a
cultivated wheat field.” In the Middle East, therefore, the impact of agriculture was thus
less a matter of raising the productivity of wheat, barley, and other cereals than of
extending the range in which they could be grown, by developing varieties that could
flourish in climates and soils that daunt the wild plant. By contrast, the Americas had no
wild maize, and thus no wild maize harvest. Stands of teosinte have been seen in the
wild, but because the “ears” are tiny and constantly shattering they are difficult to
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harvest. Thus before agriculture the people of Mesoamerica had never experienced what
it was like to stand in a field of grain. Grain fields—landscapes of food!—were part of
the mental furniture of people in Mesopotamia. They were an astounding novelty in
Mesoamerica. Indians not only created a new species, they created a new environment to
put it in. Unsurprisingly, the reverberations sounded for centuries.
Maize in the milpa, the Yale archaeologist Michael D. Coe has written, “is the
key…to the understanding of Mesoamerican civilization. Where it flourished, so did high
culture.” The statement may be more precise than it seems. In the 1970s the geographer
Anne Kirkby discovered that Indian farmers in Oaxaca considered it not worth their
while to clear and plant a milpa unless it could produce more than about two hundred
pounds of grain per acre. Using this figure, Kirkby went back to the ancient cobs
excavated from Tehuacán Valley and tried to estimate how much grain per acre they
would have yielded. The cob sizes steadily increased as they approached the present. In
Kirkby’s calculation, the harvest broke the magic two-hundred-pound line sometime
between 2000 and 1500 B.C. At about that time, the first evidence of large-scale land
clearing for milpas appears in the archaeological record. And with it appeared the Olmec,
Mesoamerica’s first great civilization.
Based on the Gulf Coast side of Mexico’s waist, on the other side of a range of
low mountains from Oaxaca, the Olmec clearly understood the profound changes
wreaked by maize—indeed, they fêted them in their art. Like the stained-glass windows
in European cathedrals, the massive Olmec sculptures and bas-reliefs were meant both to
dazzle and instruct. A major lesson is the central place of maize, usually represented by a
vertical ear with two leaves falling to the side, a talismanic symbol reminiscent of a
fleur-de-lys. In sculpture after sculpture, ears of maize spring like thoughts from the
skulls of supernatural beings. Olmec portraits of living rulers were often engraved on
stelae (long, flat stones mounted vertically in the ground and carved on the face with
images and writing). In these stela portraits, the king’s clothes, chosen to represent his
critical spiritual role in the society’s prosperity, generally included a headdress with an
ear of maize emblazoned on the front like a star. So resonant was the symbol, according
to Virginia M. Fields, curator of pre-Columbian art at the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, that in later Maya hieroglyphics “it became the semantic equivalent of the highest
royal title, ahaw.” In the Maya creation story, the famous Popul Vuh, humans were
literally created from maize.
Maize and the milpa slowly radiated throughout the Americas, stopping their
advance only where the climate grew too cold or dry. By the time of the Pilgrims, fields
of mixed maize, beans, and squash lined the New England coast and in many places
extended for miles into the interior. To the south, maize reached to Peru and Chile. Maize
was a high-status food there even though Andean cultures had developed their own
agricultural system, with potatoes occupying the central role. (Amazonia seems to have
been an exception; most but not all researchers believe maize there was eclipsed by
manioc.)
Maize had an equivalent impact on much of the rest of the world after Columbus
introduced it to Europe. Central Europeans became especially hooked on it; by the
nineteenth century, maize was the daily bread of Serbia, Rumania, and Moldavia. So
dependent did northern Italy and southwestern France become on polenta, a type of
cornmeal mush, that pellagra (caused by eating too much maize) became widespread. “I
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know little, if anything, pleasing to say about the people,” wrote Goethe, who visited
northern Italy in 1786. The women’s “features indicated misery, and the children were
just as pitiful to behold; the men are little better…. The cause of this sickly condition is
foundin the continued use of Turkish and heath corn.”
Even greater was the impact in Africa, where maize was transforming agriculture
by the end of the sixteenth century. “The probability is that the population of Africa was
greatly increased because of maize and other American Indian crops,” Alfred Crosby told
me. “Those extra people helped make the slave trade possible.” (“Other American Indian
crops” included peanuts and manioc, both now African staples.) Maize swept into Africa
as introduced disease was leveling Indian societies. Faced with a labor shortage, the
Europeans turned their eyes to Africa. The continent’s quarrelsome societies helped them
siphon off millions of people. The maize-fed population boom, Crosby believes, let the
awful trade continue without pumping the well dry.
THE STUPIDEST QUESTION IN THE WORLD
A few days after I met Ramírez Leyva, the tortilla entrepreneur, we went to
Soledad Aguablanca, a clump of small farms two hours southeast of Oaxaca City.
Waiting for us at the side of the road was Héctor Díaz Castellano, one of the farmers who
supplied Ramírez Leyva’s store. Díaz Castellano had a pencil moustache and a rakish
straw hat. His Spanish was so heavily salted with Zapotec, the language of Oaxaca’s
biggest Indian group, that I could not make out a word of it; Ramírez Leyva had to
translate. The maize field was at the end of a long, rutted dirt road that led up a rise.
Although we had left just after dawn, the sun was hot enough by our arrival to make me
wish for a hat. Díaz Castellano walked along the rows, his gaze taking in every stalk as
he passed. For an hour he spoke, almost without stopping, about his maize and the market
for his maize. He was not, I suspected, a naturally loquacious man, but that morning he
had a subject that interested him.
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Héctor Díaz Castellano
Díaz Castellano’s maize field was one of the 340,000 farms in Oaxaca. His farm,
like about two-thirds of the farms in the state, occupied less than ten acres—unviably
small by the standards of developed nations. Most landrace maize is grown on these
farms, partly because of tradition and partly because they are usually in areas that are too
high, dry, steep, or exhausted to support high-yield varieties (or owned by farmers too
poor to afford the necessary fertilizer). As if being grown on tiny farms in bad conditions
weren’t enough, landrace maize is usually less productive than modern hybrids; a typical
yield is .4 to .8 tons per acre, whereas Green Revolution varieties in Oaxaca reap between
1.2 and 2.5 tons per acre when properly fertilized, a crippling advantage. The meager
harvests may be enough for subsistence but can rarely be brought to market because farm
villages are often hours away on dirt roads from the nearest large town. But even when
farmers try, it is often little use: modern hybrids are so productive that despite the
distances involved U.S. corporations can sell maize for less in Oaxaca than can Díaz
Castellano. Landrace maize, he said, tastes better, but it is hard to find a way to make the
quality pay off. He was lucky, he said, that Ramírez Leyva was trying to market his crop.
We went to Díaz Castellano’s house for breakfast. His wife, Angelina, round and
short-haired in a tight plaid dress, was cooking tortillas in an outdoor shed with
corrugated aluminum walls. A wood fire burned beneath a concave clay griddle called a
comal. The comal was propped above the flames on three rocks—a cooking method as
old as Mesoamerican culture. By the fire, in a three-legged stone bowl, was a lump of
fresh masa twice the size of a toaster. The stereotype is that rural Mexicans are generous
to strangers. Piling my plate high, Angelina did nothing to dispel this impression.
I asked her husband what he was. I had wanted to find out which Indian group he
was born into, but he took the question another way.
“Somos hombres de maíz,” he said, enunciating clearly for my benefit. We are
men of maize.
I wasn’t sure what to make of this gnomic utterance. Was he pulling my leg?
“Everybody says that,” Ramírez Leyva said, observing my confusion. “It’s an
idiom.” A little while later I visited a Danish anthropologist at the International Maize
and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), outside Mexico City. Watching films of her
interviews with Oaxacans, I saw two old women explain to the young anthropologist that
they, too, were hombres de maíz. So Ramírez Leyva was right, I thought. A day later a
CIMMYT biologist gave me a paperback book, describing it as “the best novel ever
written about Mesoamerica.” It was Hombres de maíz, by Miguel Angel Asturias. All
right already, I thought. I get it.
Meanwhile Angelina had come out from behind the comal and joined her
husband. In the Oaxacan countryside, they explained to me, a house without maize
growing in the backyard is like a house without a roof or walls. You would never not
have maize, they said. They were speaking matter-of-factly, as if telling me how to take
the bus. Even in the city, they said, where people cannot grow maize, nobody would even
think of passing a day without eating it.
Curious, I asked what they thought would happen if they didn’t have maize every
day. Díaz Castellano looked at me as if I had asked the stupidest question in the world.
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“Why should I want to be somebody else?” he said.
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Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades
(Tales of Two Civilizations, Part II)
“LIKE GRAPES THEY FALL OFF”
On January 16, 1939, Matthew W. Stirling took an early-morning walk through
the wet, buggy forest of Veracruz state, on the Gulf Coast side of Mexico’s southern
isthmus. Eighty years before his walk, a villager traipsing through the same woods had
stumbled across a buried, six-foot-tall stone sculpture of a human head. Although the find
was of obvious archaeological importance, the object was so big and heavy that in the
intervening eight decades it had never been pulled out of the ground. Stirling, director of
the Smithsonian Bureau of American Ethnology, had gone to Mexico the year before, in
early 1938, to see the head for himself. He found it, sunk to the eyebrows in mud, after an
eight-hour horseback ride from the nearest town. The head was in the midst of about fifty
large, artificial earthen mounds—the ruins, Sterling concluded with excitement, of a
previously unknown Maya civic center. He had decided to assemble a research team and
explore the area in more detail the next year, and persuaded the National Geographic
Society to foot the bill. When he returned to Veracruz, he and his team cleared the dirt
around the great head, admiring its fine, naturalistic workmanship, so unlike the stiff,
stylized sculpture common elsewhere in Mesoamerica. Nearby, they found a stela, its
wide, flat face covered with bas-relief figures. Hoping to turn up others, Stirling was
walking that January morning to the far end of the mounded area, where a workman had
noticed a large, flat, partly submerged rock: a second stela.
Accompanying him were twelve workers from the nearby hamlet of Tres Zapotes.
They pried the stela from the ground with wooden poles, but it was blank. Disappointed,
Stirling took the crew to yet a third fallen stela. They scraped away the covering dirt and
found that it, like the first, was covered with intricate images. Alas, the carvings were
now too weathered to be deciphered. The frustrated Stirling asked the workers to expose
the back of the slab by digging beneath it and levering up the stone with poles. Several of
the men, he later recounted, “were on their knees in the excavation, cleaning the mud
from the stone with their hands, when one of them spoke up in Spanish: ‘Chief! Here are
numbers!’”
Across the back of the stela were clumps of dots and bars, a notation familiar to
Stirling from the Maya. The Maya used a dot to signify one and a horizontal bar to
signify five; the number nineteen would thus be three bars and four dots. Stirling copied
the dots and bars and “hurried back to camp, where we settled down to decipher them.”
The inscription turned out to be a date: September 3, 32 B.C, in today’s calendar.
Stirling already knew that Tres Zapotes was anomalous—it was at least 150 miles
west of any previously discovered Maya settlement. The date deepened the puzzle. If, as
seemed likely, it recorded when the stela was put on display, this implied that Tres
Zapotes had been a going concern in 32 B.C.—centuries before any other known Maya
site. The date thus seemed to imply that the Maya had originated well to the west of what
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was thought of as their traditional homeland, and much earlier than had been thought.
Stirling didn’t believe it. Surely the Maya had not sprung up in Tres Zapotes and then
moved en masse hundreds of miles to the east. But the alternative explanation—that Tres
Zapotes was not a Maya community—seemed equally improbable. The Maya were
universally regarded as the oldest advanced society in Mesoamerica. Whoever had carved
the stela had some knowledge of writing and mathematics. If they were not Maya, the
implication was that someone else had launched the project of civilization in
Mesoamerica.
Learning from local people that Tres Zapotes was only one of many mound sites
in Veracruz, Stirling decided to return in 1940 to survey them all. The task was daunting
even for a cigar-chomping, whisky-drinking, adventure addict like Stirling. Most of the
mound centers were in the middle of trackless mangrove swamps or up narrow,
unmapped rivers choked with water hyacinth. Ticks and mosquitoes were indefatigable
and present in huge numbers; the ticks were worse than the mosquitoes, Stirling
remarked, because they had to be dug out of the flesh with a knife. At one point Stirling
and a colleague hitched a ride in a pepper truck to one of the smaller sites. After jolting
down a road with deep ruts “designed to test the very souls of motorcars,” the two men
were let off in a nondescript meadow. Stirling went to talk with the driver.
“The ticks are not bad, are they?” I asked him hopefully, viewing the tall grass
and underbrush between the road and the mounds. “No,” said the driver, beaming. “When
full, like grapes they fall off and no harm is done. There are millions of them here,
however.”
In La Venta, a dry, raised “island” in the coastal swamp, Stirling’s team
discovered four more colossal heads. Like the first, they had no necks or bodies and wore
helmets that vaguely resembled athletic gear. All were at least six feet tall and fifteen feet
round and made from single blocks of volcanic basalt. How, Stirling wondered, had their
makers transported these ten-ton blocks from the mountains and across the swamp?
Whoever these people were, he eventually concluded, they could not be Maya; their ways
of life seemed too different. Instead they must have belonged to another culture
altogether. La Venta was filled with mounds and terraces, which told Stirling that many
people had lived there. The city, he wrote in 1940, “may well be the basic civilization out
of which developed such high art centers as those of the Maya, Zapotecs, Toltecs, and
Totonacs.” He called its “mysterious people” the Olmec.
Stirling’s account set the template for decades to follow. Ever since his day, the
Olmec have been known by two Homeric epithets: they were “mysterious,” and they
were the “mother culture” of Mesoamerica. (Tourists are told by Frommer’s 2005
Mexico guide, for example, to visit the ruins of the “enigmatic people” who created the
“mother culture of Mesoamerica.”) But in recent years many archaeologists have come to
believe that neither description is correct.
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Curious villagers surround the great Olmec head excavated in 1939 by
archaeologist Matthew Stirling in the Mexican state of Veracruz.
The Olmec’s purported mysteriousness is related to their emergence. To Stirling
and many of his successors, the Olmec seemed to have no peers or ancestors; they
appeared fully formed, apparently from nowhere, like Athena springing from the brow of
Zeus. First there was a jungle with a few indistinguishable villages; then, suddenly, a
sophisticated empire with monumental architecture, carved stelae, earthwork pyramids,
hieroglyphic writing, ball courts, and fine artworks—all of it conjured into existence with
the suddenness of amagician’s trick. The Olmec, wrote Smithsonian archaeologist Betty
Meggers, were a “quantum change.” Their status as precursors led archaeologists to
believe that the subsequent emergence of other complex societies was due to their
example—or their conquest. Even the mighty Maya did little more than continue down
the path set by the Olmec. “There is now little doubt,” Yale archaeologist Michael Coe
wrote in 1994, “that all later civilizations in Mesoamerica, whether Mexican or Maya,
ultimately rest on an Olmec base.”
Strictly speaking, Coe was mistaken. By the time he wrote, many of his
colleagues strongly doubted that the Olmec either emerged alone or were the mother
culture. They did emerge abruptly, these researchers say, but they were only the first of
the half-dozen complex societies—“sister cultures”—that sprang up in southern Mexico
after the development of maize agriculture. Focusing on the Olmec’s chronological
primacy, they believe, obscures the more important fact that Mesoamerica was the home
of a remarkable multisociety ferment of social, aesthetic, and technical innovation.
RUBBER PEOPLE
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Nobody knows the right name for the Olmec, but “Olmec” is the wrong one. They
spoke a language in the Mixe-Zoquean language family, some members of which are still
used in isolated pockets of southern Mexico. “Olmec,” though, is a word in Nahuatl, the
language of the Mexica to the north. It means, more or less, “people of the land of
rubber.” The problem with the name is not so much that the Olmec did not use it for
themselves—nobody knows what that name was, and they have to be called something.
Nor is the problem the rubber, which the Olmec used, and may have invented (scientists
discovered in the 1990s that they made rubber by chemically treating the latex-containing
sap of a tropical tree, Castilla elastica). The problem is that the Mexica did not actually
use the name to refer to the putative mother culture in Veracruz, but to another,
completely unrelated culture in Puebla to the west, a culture that, unlike the ancient
Olmec, still existed at the time of the Spanish conquest. The confusion between the
Mexica’s Olmec and Stirling’s Olmec led some archaeologists to propose that the latter
should be called the “La Venta Culture,” after the site he investigated. Almost everyone
agreed that the new name was a big improvement, logically speaking. Unfortunately,
nobody used it. Not for the first time in Native American history, the confusing, incorrect
name prevailed.
The Olmec heartland was the coastal forests of Veracruz. Compared to the Norte
Chico, the area is promising. Like the Peruvian littoral, it is bracketed by sea and
mountains, but it catches, rather than misses, the prevailing winds, and the rain that
comes with them. The shoreline itself is swampy, but not far from the coast the country
rises into a lush, fertile plateau. Further inland are the Tuxtla Mountains, with many
rivers cascading down their flanks. The rivers flood in the rainy season, enriching the
land, Nile Delta style. During the rest of the year, the climate is drier, and farmers plant
and tend their milpas on the alluvial soil.
The first traces of the people who would become the Olmec date back to about
1800 B.C. At that time there was little to distinguish them from groups elsewhere in
Mesoamerica. But something happened in Veracruz, some spark or incitement, a cultural
quickening, because within the next three centuries the Olmec had built and occupied San
Lorenzo, the first large-scale settlement in North America—it covered 2.7 square miles.
On a plateau commanding the Coatzacoalcos river basin, San Lorenzo proper was
inhabited mainly by the elite; everyone else lived in the farm villages around it. The
ceremonial center of the city—a series of courtyards and low mounds, the latter probably
topped with thatch houses—sat on a raised platform 150 feet high and two-thirds of a
mile to a side. The platform was built of almost three million cubic yards of rock, much
of it transported from mountain quarries fifty miles away.
Scattered around the San Lorenzo platform were stone monuments: massive
thrones for living kings, huge stone heads for dead ones. Rulers helped to mediate
between supernatural forces in the air above and the watery place below where souls
went after life. When kings died, their thrones were sometimes transformed into
memorials for their occupants: the colossal heads. The features of these enormous
portraits are naturalistically carved and amazingly expressive—thoughtful or fiercely
proud, mirthful or dismayed. It is assumed they were placed like so many stone sentinels
*20
for maximum Orwellian impact: the king is here, the king is watching you.
Like the carvings and stained-glass windows in European cathedrals, the art in
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San Lorenzo and other Olmec cities consisted mainly of powerful, recurring images—the
crucifixions and virgins, so to speak, of ancient Mesoamerica. Among these repeated
subjects is a crouched, blobby figure with a monstrously swollen head. Puzzled
researchers long described these sculptures as “dwarves” or “dancers.” In 1997 an
archaeologist and a medical doctor with archaeological leanings identified them as
human fetuses. Their features were portrayed accurately enough to identify their stage of
development. Researchers had not recognized them because artistic renditions of fetuses
are almost unheard of in European cultures (the first known drawing of one is by
Leonardo). Other frequent themes included lepers, the pathologically obese, and people
with thyroid deficiencies, all portrayed with a cool eye for anatomical detail. Perhaps the
best-known subject is a man or boy gingerly holding a “were-jaguar”: a limp, fat, sexless
baby with a flattened nose and a snarling jaguar mouth. Often the baby has a deeply
cloven skull.
The denizens of San Lorenzo are unlikely to have shared Europeans’ dismay at
the physical deformity portrayed in these images. Indeed, by contemporary standards
high-born Olmec were deformed themselves. By binding small, flat pieces of wood to
newborns’ foreheads, they pushed up the soft infant bones, making the skull longer and
higher than normal. To further proclaim their status, wealthy Olmec carved deep grooves
into their teeth and pierced their nasal septums with bone awls, plugging the holes with
ornamental jade beads. (Because no Olmec skeletons have been found, no direct proof of
these practices exists; instead archaeologists base their beliefs on the portrayal of Olmec
nobles in figurines and sculptures.)
Swanning about the elite precincts, the rich and powerful wore finely woven
clothing, but only below the waist—breechclouts for men, skirts and belts for women.
Veracruz was too hot for anything more. On public occasions, nobles bedizened
themselves with bracelets, anklets, many-stranded necklaces, bejeweled turbans, and big,
hiphop-style pendants. Some of the last were concave mirrors made from beautifully
polished magnetite. Precisely ground, the mirrors were able to start fires and project
images onto flat surfaces, camera lucida fashion. Presumably they were used to dazzle
hoi polloi. As for the poor, it is likely that they went naked, except possibly for sandals.
San Lorenzo fell in about 1200 B.C., victim of either revolution or invasion. Or
perhaps it was abandoned and sacked for religious reasons—archaeologists have
advanced several hypotheses for the city’s demise. What is certain is that the site was
vacated and the stelae defaced and the sculptures decapitated. The colossal heads being,
so to speak, pre-decapitated, they were smashed with hammers and systematically buried
in long lines. Vegetation overran the red-ocher floors and the workshops that
manufactured ceramic figurines and iron beads and rubber ax-head straps.
Olmec society was surprisingly unaffected by the collapse of its greatest polity. A
much bigger city, La Venta, was going up on a swamp island about forty miles away.
Today La Venta is partly buried by an oil refinery, but in its heyday—roughly
speaking, 1150 B.C. to 500 B.C.—it was a large community with a ring of housing that
surrounded a grand ceremonial center. The city’s focus, its Eiffel Tower or Tiananmen
Square, was a 103-foot-tall clay mound, a bulging, vertically fluted cone somewhat
resembling a head of garlic. The mound rose at the south end of a rectangular,
hundred-yard-long pavilion that was bordered by two knee-high berms. At the north end
of the pavilion was a sunken rectangular courtyard fenced on three sides by a row of
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seven-foot basalt columns atop a low red and yellow adobe wall. The fourth, northern
side opened onto a third mound, larger than the small mound but nowhere near the size of
the big one. The pavilion and courtyard had painted walls and floors of colored sand and
clay; heavy sculptural objects, including several of the trademark heads, studded the area.
This central part of the city was reserved, archaeologists believe, for clerics and rulers. It
was Buckingham Palace and the Vatican rolled into one.
La Venta, too, was destroyed, perhaps deliberately, around 350 B.C. But its
eight-hundred-year existence spanned one of the most exciting times in American history.
At La Venta’s height, Olmec art and technical innovations could be found throughout
Mesoamerica. So widespread was Olmec iconography—jaguar babies, carved stelae,
distinctively shaped ceramics—that many archaeologists believed its very ubiquity was
evidence that the Olmec “not only engendered Mesoamerica but also brought forth the
first Mesoamerican empire.” The description is from Ignacio Bernal, once director of
Mexico’s famed National Museum of Anthropology. Bernal, who died in 1992,
envisioned an imperium that spanned much of southern Mexico, proselytizing its religion
and forcing other groups to send their finest works to its heartland. The Olmec, he
thought, were the Romans of Mesoamerica, a magisterial society that “established the
pattern which, through the centuries, was to be followed by other expansionist
Mesoamerican cultures.”
Since Bernal’s death many researchers have come to view the Olmec differently.
According to the University of Michigan anthropologists Kent Flannery and Joyce
Marcus, the Olmec heartland was but one of four regional power centers: the Central
Basin to the north, where settlements like Tlatilco and Tlapacoya laid the groundwork for
the empires of Teotihuacan and the Toltecs; in the isthmus, the chiefdoms of Oaxaca; the
Olmec, along the Gulf Coast; and, later, the Maya polities in Yucatán and northern
Guatemala. Some believe that there was a fifth power: Chalcatzingo, an important
chiefdom between the Central Basin and Oaxaca.
In the first millennium B.C., all four (or five) were making the transition from
individual fortified villages to groups of chiefdoms to states with centralized authority.
Although the Olmec preceded the others, they did not set the template for them. Instead
they all influenced each other, sometimes by trade, sometimes by violence, each one
developing new techniques, exporting unique goods, and swiping ideas from the others.
In this world of “competitive interaction,” all parties hustled for advantage. Trade in
goods was important, but it was the trade in ideas that mattered.
By making this argument, I am endorsing one side in the long-running dispute
between mother- and sister-culture proponents. In other words, as one mother-culture
advocate put it, I am “swallowing Marcus’s [nonsense] whole.” He may be right. But I
would argue that there is a difference between inheriting a cultural tradition, as the Norte
Chico culture’s successors apparently did, and copying one, as the Olmec’s proponents
argue. Nobody disputes that Han Chinese society arose long before its neighbors in Asia,
but Asian archaeologists don’t refer to China as Asia’s “mother culture,” because China’s
neighbors used part of its intellectual legacy to build up their own distinct and different
writing systems, agricultural technologies, imperial practices, and much else. Given the
evidence available now, the same seems to be true for the Olmec and ancient
Mesoamerica. (To me, anyway—many researchers disagree.)
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MESOAMERICA, 1000 B.C.–1000 A.D.
For thousands of years Mesoamerica was a wellspring of cultural innovation and
growth. This map does not depict it accurately, because these societies were not
contemporaries—the Olmec vanished centuries before the Ñudzahui and Zapotec began
to reach their height, for example. Nonetheless, it should give some idea of each society’s
heartland.
Emblematic of this rocketing growth were the Olmec’s neighbors in Oaxaca, the
Zapotec, whom Flannery and Marcus have studied for more than two decades. The
Zapotec were based across the mountains from the Olmec, in Oaxaca’s high Central
Valley—three forty-to-sixty-mile-long bowls that intersect in a ragged Y. By about 1550
B.C., they were abandoning the life of hunting and gathering to live in villages with
defensive palisades.
*21 These early villages had wattle-and-daub houses, fine pottery,
and some public architecture. They were controlled by “big men,” the social scientist’s
term for the alpha male who is able in such informal settings to enforce his will through
persuasion or force. Within a few hundred years, the big men acquired rank—that is, they
began to wield power not only because of their personal charisma, but also because their
societies had given them an elevated official position. It is the difference between the
leading spirit on a pickup basketball team and the officially selected captain of a college
squad. After this, political consolidation proceeded apace. Soon the valley was dominated
by three main chiefdoms, one at each endpoint of the Y. They did not get along; a
thirty-square-mile buffer zone in the middle, Flannery and Marcus noted, was “virtually
unoccupied.”
The biggest of the three chiefdoms was located near today’s village of San José
Mogote. Around 750 B.C. it was attacked and its temple razed in a fire so intense that the
clay walls melted. San José Mogote quickly rebuilt the temple a few yards away.
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Across the new threshold artisans laid a carved stone. Splayed across its face,
suitable for stomping on, was a bas-relief of a naked, disemboweled male corpse,
apparently a defeated enemy, blood welling from his side. The carving, to my taste, is
beautifully done, as graphically elegant, despite the gory subject matter, as a Matisse.
What matters most to researchers, though, is not the design but the two curious marks
between the cadaver’s feet. The two marks are glyphs: the oldest firmly dated writing in
the Americas. Despite their brevity, they are full of information, both because of the
nature of written language, and because of the special way Mesoamerican people chose
their names.
COUNTING AND WRITING
Writing begins with counting. When a culture grows big enough, it acquires an
elite, which needs to monitor things it considers important: money, stored goods, births
and deaths, the progression of time. In the Fertile Crescent, village accountants began
keeping records with clay tokens around 8000 B.C. As the need for precision grew, they
scratched marks on the tokens as mnemonic devices. For example, they might have
distinguished a count of sheep from one of wheat by drawing a sheep on one and a wheat
stalk on the other. Gradually the information on each record increased. The bureaucrats
were not intending to create writing. Instead they were simply adding useful features as
they became necessary. By 3200 B.C. Sumerian scribes had progressed to inscribing on
clay tablets with sharpened reeds. A tablet might contain, say, two hash marks, a box, a
circle with a cross in the middle, an asterisk-like shape, and an arrangement of three
triangles. Scribes would know that the hash marks meant “two,” the box was a “temple,”
the circle stood for “cattle,” an asterisk meant “goddess,” and the triangles were
“Inanna”—two cattle owned by the goddess Inanna’s temple. (Here I am lifting an
example from Gary Urton, a Harvard anthropologist.) They had no way to indicate verbs
or adjectives, no way to distinguish subject from object, and only a limited vocabulary.
Nonetheless, Sumerians were moving toward something like writing.
In Mesoamerica, timekeeping provided the stimulus that accounting gave to the
Middle East. Like contemporary astrologers, the Olmec, Maya, and Zapotec believed that
celestial phenomena like the phases of the moon and Venus affect daily life. To measure
and predict these portents requires careful sky watching and a calendar. Strikingly,
Mesoamerican societies developed three calendars: a 365-day secular calendar like the
contemporary calendar; a 260-day sacred calendar that was like no other calendar on
earth; and the equally unique Long Count, a one-by-one tally of the days since a fixed
starting point thousands of years ago. Establishing these three calendars required
advances in astronomy; synchronizing them required ventures into mathematics.
The 260-day ritual calendar may have been linked to the orbit of Venus; the
365-day calendar, of course, tracked the earth’s orbit around the sun. Dates were typically
given in both notations. For example, October 12, 2004, is 2 Lamat 11 Yax, where 2
Lamat is the date in the ritual calendar and 11 Yax the date in the secular calendar.
Because the two calendars do not have the same number of days, they are not
synchronized; the next time 2 Lamat occurs in the sacred calendar, it will be paired with a
different day in the secular calendar. After October 12, 2004, in fact, 2 Lamat and 11 Yax
will not coincide again for another 18,980 days, about fifty-two years.
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Mesoamerican cultures understood all this, and realized that by citing dates with
both calendars they were able to identify every day in this fifty-two-year period uniquely.
What they couldn’t do was distinguish one fifty-two-year period from another. It was as
if the Christian calendar referred to the year only as, say, ’04—one would then be unable
to distinguish between 1904, 2004, and 2104. To prevent confusion, Mesoamerican
societies created the third calendar, the Long Count. The Long Count tracks time from a
starting point, much as the Christian calendar begins with the purported birth date of
Christ. The starting point is generally calculated to have been August 13, 3114, B.C.,
though some archaeologists put the proper date at August 10 or 11, or even September 6.
Either way, Long Count dates consisted of the number of days, 20-day “months,”
360-day “years,” 7,200-day “decades,” and 144,000-day “millennia” since the starting
point. Archaeologists generally render these as a series of five numbers separated by dots,
in the manner of Internet Protocol addresses. Using the August 13 starting date, October
12, 2006, would be written in the Long Count as 12.19.13.12.18. (For a more complete
explanation, see Appendix D.)
Because it runs directly from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D., the Christian calendar was long a
headache for astronomers. Scientists tracking supernovae, cometary orbits, and other
celestial phenomena would still have to add or subtract a year manually when they
crossed the A.D.-B.C. barrier if a sixteenth-century astronomer named Joseph Scaliger
hadn’t got sick of the whole business and devised a calendar for astronomers that doesn’t
skip a year. The Julian calendar, which Scaliger named after his father, counts the days
since Day 0. Scaliger chose Day 0 as January 1, 4713, B.C.; Day 1 was January 2. In this
system, October 12, 2006, is Julian Day 2,454,021.
The Long Count calendar began with the date 0.0.0.0.0.
*22 Mathematically,
what is most striking about this date is that the zeroes are true zeroes. Zero has two
functions. It is a number, manipulated like other numbers, which means that it is
differentiated from nothing. And it is a placeholder in a positional notation system, such
as our base-10 system, in which a number like 1 can signify a single unit if it is in the
digits column or ten units if it is in the adjacent column.
That zero is not the same as nothing is a concept that baffled Europeans as late as
the Renaissance. How can you calculate with nothing? they asked. Fearing that
Hindu-Arabic numerals—the 0 through 9 used today—would promote confusion and
fraud, some European authorities banned them until the fourteenth century. A classic
demonstration of zero’s status as a number, according to science historian Dick Teresi, is
grade point average:
In a four-point system, an A equals 4, B equals 3, and so on, down to E, which
equals 0. If a student takes four courses and gets A’s in two but fails the other two, he
receives a GPA of 2.0, or a C average. The two zeroes drag down the two A’s. If zero
were nothing, the student could claim that the grades for the courses he failed did not
exist, and demand a 4.0 average. His dean would laugh at such logic.
Without a positional notation system, arithmetic is tedious and hard, as
schoolchildren learn when teachers force them to multiply or subtract with Roman
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numerals. In Roman numerals, CLIV is 154, whereas XLII is 42. Maddeningly, both
numbers have L (50) as the second symbol, but the two L’s aren’t equivalent, because the
second is modified by the preceding X, which subtracts ten from it to make forty. Even
though both CLIV and XLII are four-digit numbers, the left-hand symbol in the first
number (C) cannot be directly compared with the left-hand symbol in the second (X).
Positional notation symbols take the aggravation out of arithmetic.
Stirling’s stela in Tres Zapotes bore a Long Count date of 7.16.6.16.18. The
implication is that by 32 B.C. the Olmec already had all three calendars and zero to boot.
One can’t be sure, because the date does not include a zero or a reference to the other
calendars. But it is hard to imagine how one could have a Long Count without them.
Tentatively, therefore, archaeologists assign the invention of zero to sometime before 32
B.C., centuries ahead of its invention in India.
How long before 32 B.C.? The carved cadaver in San José Mogote may give a
hint. In Mesoamerican cultures, the date of one’s birth was such an important augury of
the future that people often acquired that day as their name. It was as if coming into the
world on New Year’s Day were such a sign of good fortune that children born on that day
would be named “January 1.” This seems to have been the case for the man whose death
was celebrated in the San José Mogote temple. Between his feet are two glyphs, one
resembling a stovepipe hat with a U painted across the front, the other looking vaguely
like a smiling pet monster from a Japanese cartoon. According to Marcus, the Michigan
anthropologist, the glyphs correspond to 1-Earthquake, the Zapotec name for the
seventeenth day of the 260-day sacred calendar. Because the carving depicts a man
instead of an event, the date is generally thought to be the dead man’s name. If so,
1-Earthquake is the first named person in the history of the Americas. Even if the date is
not a name, the two glyphs indicate that by 750 B.C., when the slab was carved, the
Zapotec were not only on the way to some form of writing, but had also assembled some
of the astronomical and mathematical knowledge necessary for a calendar.
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Discovered in 1975, this prone, disemboweled man was carved onto the stone
threshold of a temple in San José Mogote, near the city of Oaxaca. Between the corpse’s
feet is the oldest certainly dated writing in the Americas: two glyphs (shaded in drawing)
that probably represent his name, 1-Earthquake. The ornate scroll issuing from his side is
blood. According to Joyce Marcus, the first archaeologist to examine this bas-relief, the
Zapotec words for “flower” and “sacrificial object” are similar enough that the flowery
blood may be a visual pun.
To judge by the archaeological record, this development took place in an
astonishingly compressed period; what took the Sumerians six thousand years apparently
occurred in Mesoamerica in fewer than a thousand. Indeed, Mesoamerican societies
during that time created more than a dozen systems of writing, some of which are known
only from a single brief text. The exact chronology of their evolution remains unknown,
but could be resolved by the next object that a farmer discovers in a field. The earliest
known Olmec writing, for example, is on a potsherd from Chiapas that dates from about
300 B.C. For a long time nobody could read it. In 1986 a workcrew building a dock on
the Acula River in Veracruz pulled out a seven-foot stela covered with Olmec symbols.
Thought to have been written in 159 A.D., the twenty-one columns of glyphs were the
first Olmec text long enough to permit linguists to decipher the language. Two linguists
did just that in 1993. The stela recounted the rise of a warrior-king named Harvest
Mountain Lord who celebrated his ascension to the throne by decapitating his main rival
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during the coronation. This information in hand, the linguists went back to the writing on
the potsherd. Disappointingly, it turned out to be some banal utterances about dying and
cutting cloth.
FROM 1-EARTHQUAKE TO 8-DEER
The development of writing in Zapotec society went hand-in-hand with growing
urbanization. In about 500 B.C., San José Mogote seems to have transplanted itself to
Monte Albán, in the middle of the buffer zone. About half an hour by bus from Oaxaca
City, Monte Albán is today a decorous sprawl of walls and pyramids enveloped by a lush
lawn (this last is an import from Europe; lawn grass did not exist in the Americas prior to
Columbus). Arriving tourists are hailed by “guides” with backpacks full of phony ancient
figurines and ethnically incorrect souvenirs of Mexica drawings. Their ministrations do
not diminish the lonely dignity of the ruins. Monte Albán is atop a steep, 1,500-foot hill
that overlooks the valley of Oaxaca. The Zapotec reconfigured the entire hill to build the
city, slicing out terraces and platforms. By leveling the entire summit, they created a
fifty-five-acre terrace half the size of the Vatican. At its zenith, Monte Albán housed
seventeen thousand people and was by a considerable margin the biggest and most
powerful population center in Mesoamerica.
The rationale for its construction is the subject of yet another lengthy
archaeological dispute. One side proposes that Monte Albán formed because maize
agriculture allowed the Oaxaca Valley’s population to grow so much that the rural
villages naturally clustered into something resembling cities. For most of its history
Monte Albán was thus a huge village, not a true city, and certainly not a hierarchical
state. Others argue that warfare had grown so devastating, as shown by the destruction of
San José Mogote, that the main valley chiefdoms formed a defensive confederation
headquartered at Monte Albán. Yet a third theory is that the Zapotec of Monte
Albán—not the Olmec of La Venta—consolidated to form North America’s first
imperialist power, an aggressive state that subjugated dozens of other villages.
Among the strongest evidence for the last view are the nearly three hundred
carved stone slabs at Monte Albán that depict slain, mutilated enemies: the rulers, Marcus
believes, of communities conquered by Monte Albán. Some of the stones are labeled with
enemy names, as with the unfortunate 1-Earthquake. These may commemorate victories
in Monte Albán’s grinding battle for supremacy with its local rival, San Martín Tilcajete,
in the southern arm of the Central Valley. When San José Mogote founded Monte Albán,
Tilcajete responded by gathering people from its surrounding villages, doubling in size,
and erecting its own ceremonial buildings. War was the inevitable result. Monte Albán
sacked Tilcajete in about 375 B.C. Undiscouraged, Tilcajete rebuilt itself on a better
defensive position and acquired larger armies. When it again became a threat, Monte
Albán attacked for the second time in 120 B.C. This time its forces finished the job. They
burned the king’s palace to the ground and emptied the rest of Tilcajete, leaving Monte
Albán firmly in control of the entire valley.
With nothing to impede it, Monte Albán swept out and established a domain of
almost ten thousand square miles. For centuries it stood on equal ground with its
neighbors, the rising Maya states to the east and Teotihuacan to the north. It enjoyed
relatively peaceful relations with both but had continual trouble with the Ñudzahui
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(pronounced “nu-sa-wi”—Spaniards called them the Mixtec), a constellation of petty
principalities immediately to the west. By contrast with Monte Albán, these were
minuscule entities; most were clusters of rustic villages covering ten to twenty square
miles. Yet they were amazingly troublesome. Monte Albán repeatedly overran the
Ñudzahui statelets, but never managed to eliminate them. These tiny, fractious domains
endured for more than a thousand years. Meanwhile the much stronger and more
centralized Zapotec empire collapsed completely in about 800 A.D.
Ñudzahui writing survives in eight codices, the deerskin or bark “books” whose
painted pages could be folded like screens or hung on the wall like a mural. (The
Spaniards destroyed all the rest.) More purely pictorial than Zapotec or Maya script, the
texts were arranged almost randomly on the page; red lines directed the reader’s eye from
image to image. The symbols included drawings of events, portraits labeled by name (the
king 4-Wind, for example, being shown by symbolic wind and four little bubbles in a
line), and even punning rebuses. Enough writing has survived to give, when coupled with
archaeological studies, a vivid picture of Ñudzahui life.
Like medieval Italian city-states, Ñudzahui principalities were rigidly stratified,
with the king and a small group of kinspeople and noble advisers gobbling up much of
the wealth and land. They constantly shifted configuration, some expanding by swarming
over their neighbors, others imploding when their constituent villages seceded and joined
other polities. More commonly, two states joined when their rulers married. Alliance
through royal marriage was as common in eleventh-century Mixteca as it was in
seventeenth-century Europe. In both, royal family trees formed an intricate network
across national boundaries, but in Mixteca the queen’s lands stayed in her line—the
king’s heir wasn’t necessarily the queen’s heir. Another difference: primogeniture was
not expected. If the queen did not think her eldest son was fit for the crown, she could
pass it to another child, or even to a nephew or cousin.
No fewer than four of the codices treat the story of 8-Deer Jaguar Claw, a wily
priest-general-politician with a tragic love for the wife of his greatest enemy. Born in
1063 A.D., 8-Deer was a shirttail cousin to the ruling family of Tilantongo, which had
been engaged for decades in a dynastic struggle with the kingdom of Red and White
Bundle. (The name, a modern invention, comes from its name-glyph, which pictures the
cloth wrapping used by the Ñudzahui to wrap holy objects; its exact location is still not
nailed down.) Like his father, a high cleric, 8-Deer was trained for the priesthood, but
political events and his own overweening ambition stopped him from following that path.
After an unprovoked attack on Red and White Bundle by Tilantongo raised
hostilities to a fever, the warring parties agreed to meet in a sacred mountain cave with
the Priestess of the Dead, a powerful oracle who had stripped away the flesh from her
jaw, giving her a terrifying, skull-like appearance. Tilantongo’s representative was
8-Deer, who attended the meeting in place of his recently deceased father. To his dismay,
the priestess sided with Tilantongo’s enemies and ordered 8-Deer, Tilantongo’s
champion, to exile himself a hundred miles away, in a jerkwater town on the Pacific
called Tututepec.
Tucked away in Tututepec, 8-Deer assembled a private army, staffed it with many
relatives, and in a series of swift campaigns seized dozens of neighboring villages and
city-states. In addition to assembling the greatest empire ever seen in the region, the
conquests managed to kill off most of the siblings and cousins above him in the line of
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oyal succession. After six years of war he returned home to Tilantongo. During this visit,
according to John M. D. Pohl, the archaeologist whose interpretations I am mostly
following here, 8-Deer accidentally encountered 6-Monkey, the young wife of the much
older king of Red and White Bundle. Despite the long enmity between the two kingdoms,
8-Deer and 6-Monkey secretly became lovers.
In 1096 Tilantongo’s sovereign died in mysterious circumstances. The Priestess
of the Dead selected 8-Deer’s beloved elder half brother to be the regent—that is, the half
brother became the last person between 8-Deer and the throne of Tilantongo. Three years
later, unknown assailants stabbed the half brother to death in a sweatbath. The
inconsolable 8-Deer took the throne of Tilantongo and declared war on Red and White
Bundle, which he claimed had orchestrated the murder.
In this fragment from a Ñudzahui codex, the jaguar-cowled Lord 8-Deer (right)
captures 4-Wind, son of his former lover, by the hair. As in other Ñudzahui codices, the
characters’ names are indicated by the accompanying circles-plus-head symbols.
Red and White Bundle’s royal palace was built on a cliff over a bend in the river.
Guarded by sheer walls on three sides, its soldiers had only to watch the fourth side,
across which was an earthen berm. Leading an army of a thousand, 8-Deer threw up
ladders, swarmed over the berm with his men, and entered the palace. As befit a
conqueror, 8-Deer was wearing elaborate cotton armor, a ceremonial beard wig, and a
cowl made from the head of a jaguar. Gold-and-jade necklaces dangled across his naked
chest. In the palace he found 6-Monkey and her husband, the king of Red and White
Bundle. Both were mortally wounded. In Pohl’s account, 8-Deer held 6-Monkey as she
died.
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Captured with the royal couple were their two sons, the elder of whom, 4-Wind,
was heir to the throne. Seizing him by the hair, 8-Deer forced the teenager to grovel
before him. But he also made what seems to have been a sentimental decision: he spared
the life of his lover’s son. The folly of this action became apparent when 4-Wind and his
brother escaped from confinement.
Seeking revenge, 4-Wind approached the Zapotec empire for help. With Zapotec
backing, he linked rebels in Red and White Bundle and a host of other cities defeated by
8-Deer. They besieged Tilantongo in 1115. The battle lasted six months and ended in
total defeat for Tilantongo. In a mirror image of the past, the captured 8-Deer was forced
to bow to 4-Wind. He was fifty-five years old and had six official kingships and dozens
of petty states under his control. Victorious and vengeful, 4-Wind personally
disemboweled him. Then he married 8-Deer’s daughter.
In 4-Wind’s first exercise of statecraft, he abandoned the Zapotec allies who had
helped him achieve the throne, aligned Tilantongo with the Toltec empire to the north,
and attacked the Zapotec. Ultimately the Ñudzahui under his lead took over much of
Oaxaca, forcing the Zapotec states to pay tribute. The empire he established, far bigger
than 8-Deer’s, lasted until the fifteenth century, when the Mexica invaded. And then
came Cortés.
WHEELED INTERLUDE
As Matthew Stirling and his team were dodging ticks and unearthing stelae in
Tres Zapotes, they found a cache of fifteen upside-down pottery bowls tucked into the
ground six feet below the surface. The bowls protectively covered thirty-five toy-size,
decorated figurines and twelve small, painted clay discs. Among the figurines were two
dogs and a jaguar, each of which had thin tubes joining its two front feet and its two back
feet. The discs lay beside them. Similar finds have been made further north, near Mexico
City.
In the 1980s I saw the Tres Zapotes animals, or ones like them, at a museum in
the Yucatán Peninsula. I was there with an Italian engineer whom I had met by chance a
few hours before. Well before me, the engineer figured out the significance of the tubes
between the figurines’ feet. “Those are for axles,” he said. “And those”—pointing to the
discs—“must be the wheels.” Looking at the little figures, it seemed obvious that they
had been equipped with wheels in precisely the form he suggested.
The engineer scrunched up his face with incredulity. Tres Zapotes dated back to at
least 1000 B.C. So the Olmec and their successors must have had the wheel for more than
two thousand years. “Why didn’t they use it for anything other than little toys?” he asked
in Italian. “How could they not have understood that you could make bigger wheels and
put them on carts? Hanno fatto proprio una stupidaggine, quei tipi.”
The word stupidaggine (an absurdity), similar enough in Italian and Spanish, rang
out in the room, drawing stares. The engineer seemed not to care. He looked positively
offended at the Olmec failure to see the world in the same way as a contemporary
European engineer.
I’m giving my acquaintance a hard time, but his bafflement was easy for me to
understand. In Mesopotamia, the wheel dates back to at least the time of Sumer. It was a
basic part of life throughout Eurasia. Chariot wheels, water wheels, potter’s wheels,
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millstone wheels—one can’t imagine Europe or China without them. The only thing
more mysterious than failing to invent the wheel would be inventing the wheel and then
failing to use it. But that is exactly what the Indians did. Presumably countless thousands
of people rolled the toylike figurines back and forth. How could none of them have
thought of making their wheels bigger and more useful?
Some reasons are apparent. Because of the Pleistocene extinctions, the Americas
lacked animals suitable for domestication into beasts of burden; without animals to haul
carts, individuals on rough terrain can use skids almost as effectively. Even with animals,
though, the Olmec would not have had much use for wheeled vehicles. Their country is
so wet and boggy that Stirling’s horses sank to their chests in mud; boats were a primary
means of transportation until recently. In addition one might note that Mesoamerican
societies were not alone in their wheel-blindness. Although Mesopotamia had the wheel
in about 4000 B.C., nearby Egypt did not use the wheel until two thousand years later,
despite being in close contact. Still, none of this explains why no Mesoamerican society
ever used wheels to make ceramics and grind maize. After all, every society in Eurasia
eventually employed pottery wheels and mill wheels.
A better answer might be one implicit in Robert Temple’s book, The Genius of
China, a history of Chinese science and technology published in 1998. According to
Temple, the Chinese invented the moldboard plow by the third century B.C. Made of cast
iron, the plowshare was shaped like a V, with the blade carving into the ground and the
two arms arcing away like gull wings. Because the arms were curved, they turned the
earth away from the blade, which both reduced friction and more effectively plowed the
soil. (The “moldboard” is the curved plowshare; the name comes from mold, the Old
German word for soil.)
The design of the moldboard plow is so obvious that it seems incredible that
Europeans never thought of it. Until the Chinese-style plow was imported in the
seventeenth century, farmers in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and other states
labored to shove what amounted to a narrow slab of metal through the earth. “The
increased friction meant that huge multiple teams of oxen were required, whereas
Chinese plows could make do with a single ox,” Temple explained. The European failure
to think up the moldboard, according to science historian Teresi, was “as if Henry Ford
designed the car without an accelerator, and you had to put the car in neutral, brake, and
go under the hood to change speed. And then we did this for 2,000 years.”
European agricultural production exploded after the arrival of the moldboard
plow. The prosperity this engendered was one of the cushions on which the
Enlightenment floated. “So inefficient, so wasteful of effort, and so utterly exhausting”
was the old plow, Temple wrote, “that this deficiency of plowing may rank as mankind’s
single greatest waste of time and energy.” Millions of Europeans spent centuries behind
the plow, staring at the blade as it ineffectively mired itself in the earth. How could none
of them have thought of changing the design to make the plow more useful?
The complexity of a society’s technology has little to do with its level of social
complexity—something that we, in our era of rapidly changing, seemingly overwhelming
technology, have trouble grasping. Every society, big or little, misses out on “obvious”
technologies. The lacunae have enormous impact on people’s lives—imagine Europe
with efficient plows or the Maya with iron tools—but not much effect on the scale of a
civilization’s endeavors, as shown by both European and Maya history. The corollary is
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that widespread and open trade in ideas is the best way to make up for the lacunae. Alas,
Mesoamerica was limited in this respect. Like Europe, it was an extraordinarily diverse
place with a shared cultural foundation. But where Europe had the profoundly different
civilizations of China and Islam to steal from, Mesoamerica was alone in the world.
Or seemed to be, anyway.
A SLICE OF PERU
About a hundred miles north of the Peru-Chile border, the coastal highway passes
by an uninhabited beach ringed by a tall chain-link fence. The fence has an entrance with
a gigantic, stylized statue of a woman with huge earrings. By the statue hangs a faded
banner: Bolivia Mar.
When Bolivia declared its independence it had a territorial pseudopod that
extended southwest from its Andean heartland through the Atacama Desert to the sea.
The land was useless for agriculture but had four plausible seaports and huge
underground deposits of prehistoric guano, which Chilean companies mined and shipped
to Europe for fertilizer. (Bolivia, then as now impoverished, didn’t have the capital for
this industry.) In 1878, Hilarion Daza, the illegitimate son of an Italian acrobat, seized
power in Bolivia. Immediately he raised taxes on the Chilean-owned guano mines, which
the previous Bolivian government had promised not to do. Outraged, Chile rolled its
army into the area. In vain did Bolivia counterattack with its ally, Peru; Chile simply
repelled their incompetently led forces and took over the entire territory, as well as a
chunk of southern Peru. Ejected in an outburst of popular anger, Daza fled to Europe,
taking most of Bolivia’s treasury with him.
Chile finally returned most of Peru’s territory in 1929 but never gave back any
land to Bolivia—an outcome that nation has never accepted. To this day, Bolivia’s
parliament has a representative from the lost maritime province. The Miss Bolivia contest
always includes a contestant ostensibly from the coast. Maps are sold in which the
conquered land is still part of Bolivia.
In a gesture to its longtime, long-suffering ally, Peru symbolically gave two miles
of its shoreline to Bolivia in 1992. Bolivia Mar—Bolivia-by-the-Sea—is a little island of
Bolivia entirely surrounded by Peru. It has no facilities of any kind, so far as I could tell
when I passed by. Private enterprise was supposed to build an industrial duty-free port in
Bolivia Mar. Thus far the free market has not accepted the challenge. Every now and then
parties of Bolivians drive down to Bolivia Mar to swim—a political gesture.
The main highway from Bolivia Mar to Bolivia itself follows the Osmore Valley,
cutting a perfect sectional slice through Peru on the way. For the first fifteen miles the
road climbs through a desert landscape almost devoid of settlement and prone to fog.
Then the road hits a plateau and the fog dissipates. The landscape that comes into view is
so dry that in most years the Osmore River simply disappears into the desert.
Around the small city of Moquegua the river hoves back into view and the
highway abruptly pitches into the Cordillera Negra. The windshield fills with enough
canyons, bluffs, mesas, and cliffs for a dozen Road Runner cartoons. Standing higher
than its neighbors, at an altitude of about eight thousand feet, is a wide pillar of rock with
a rounded, convoluted top that vaguely resembles the rounded, convoluted top of a
human brain. The pillar is called Cerro Baúl. For about two hundred years, it was the sole
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meeting ground of two of the Americas’ largest societies—societies similar in scale to,
say, the Maya realm, but much less well known.
The two states, Wari and Tiwanaku, were probably the greatest of the Inkas’
forerunners, and certainly the predecessors from whom they took the most. In their
separate ways, both were children of Norte Chico. They worshipped figures in Staff God
poses, lived in networks of vertical exchange, and had public architecture with designs
based on templates from the coast. But in other ways they were as different from each
other as Sicily and Scandinavia. Of the two, Wari was the more conventional, centralized
state. Based east of Lima in the Andes heights, it first became prominent in the sixth
century A.D.—a bad time to be launching a nation on the Pacific side of South America.
At about that time, Andean societies were assailed by the first of several decades-long
droughts, paradoxically interrupted by El Niño–induced floods. Some polities may have
disintegrated beneath the climatic assault, but Wari thrived. The principal reason for its
success was its innovative techniques of terracing and irrigation, the latter being used to
implement the former. Surprisingly, Peru has more arable land above nine thousand feet
than below. By diverting snowmelt from the ever-present Andes icecaps to high farm
terraces, Wari was able literally to rise above the drought and flooding of lower
elevations.
An anomaly in the southern Andes foothills, the great stone of Cerro Baúl
dominates the neighboring slopes. On its summit are the remains of a Wari city.
The staple crop of the highlands was the potato, which unlike maize regularly
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grows at altitudes of 14,000 feet; the tubers, cultivated in hundreds of varieties, can be
left in the ground for as long as a year (as long as the soil stays above 27°F), to be dug up
and cooked when needed. Even frozen potatoes could be used. After letting freezing
night temperatures break down the tubers’ cell walls, Andean farmers stomped out the
water content to make dried chuño, a nigh-indestructible foodstuff that could be stored
for years. (The potato’s cold tolerance spurred its embrace by European peasants. Not
only did potatoes grow in places where other crops could not, the plant was an ally in
smallholders’ ceaseless struggle against the economic and political elite. A farmer’s
barnful of wheat, rye, or barley was a fat target for greedy landlords and marauding
armies; buried in the soil, a crop of potatoes could not be easily seized.) Maize, though,
was what people wanted, the grain of choice for the elite—it was what you made chicha
from. Its prestige was another reason for Wari’s success. Because terraces soak up more
sunlight than steep slopes, maize can be grown at higher than usual altitudes on them;
irrigation similarly increases the area available for maize farming.
In a process that Michael Moseley has likened to “patenting and marketing a
major invention,” the Wari passed on their reclamation techniques to their neighbors,
bringing a thousand-mile-long swath of the Peruvian Andes under their cultural sway. A
sign of their influence was the spread of the Wari religion, in which the figure
archaeologists call Staff God was dominant—though the Wari transformed the staff, as if
to remind others of their agricultural beneficence, into a stalk of maize. By the end of the
first millennium A.D., Wari techniques had reclaimed more than a million acres of
cropland from mountainsides that almost anywhere else would have been regarded as
impossibly dry, steep, and cold. Today three-quarters of the terraces are abandoned, and
the alpine landscape has not regained the productivity it had a thousand years ago. But
until the Spanish conquest Andean valleys were so thoroughly punctuated by
Wari-inspired terraces that to the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo they looked “as if they were
covered with flights of stairs.”
Wari’s capital city, also named Wari, occupied an alpine plateau near the modern
city of Ayacucho. Construction began in the first few centuries A.D. The city ultimately
spread across two square miles, an array of two- and three-story buildings in compounds
behind massive walls. Both peasant homes and great palaces were built in similar styles,
according to William H. Isbell, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at
Binghamton, and Alexei Vranich, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Everything was enclosed behind high, white
walls, in what the two researchers described in 2004 as a hive of “repetitive, modular
cells organized in high-walled geometric blocks.” There were no standout public
buildings, no great public spaces, no spectacular vistas—only a thicket of walls and
narrow streets strewn with garbage (archaeologists have turned up so few clean floors
and surfaces, Isbell and Vranich wrote, “that it is apparent that Wari people experienced
domestic refuse as benign and unthreatening”). Apparently the walls ringing and
crisscrossing the city were intended for privacy, not protection; Wari was not located in
an easily defended spot. Along the spine of the Andes the empire set up a string of a
dozen administrative centers that were like smaller versions of the capital. These were not
built with defense in mind, either. Indeed, there is little record of Wari warfare. Its
supremacy was commercial and intellectual; it was based less on infantry troops than on
innovative technology. All of which may explain some of its behavior in Cerro Baúl.
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Wari emissaries arrived in Moquegua around 600 A.D., according to Patrick Ryan
Williams and Donna V. Nash, Field Museum archaeologists who have been working
there since the early 1990s. A simpler culture had already staked out the best farmland in
the area. The Wari neither aggressively threw them out nor withdrew in dismay. Guided,
one imagines, by instructions from headquarters, they quickly set up living quarters on
Cerro Baúl itself. The big mesa is to this day regarded as an apu, an ancient spirit
transfigured into rock. Thus putting a city directly on top of it was an arresting statement:
Here we are.
On a practical level, living on a five-hundred-yard-long mesa was a daunting task.
To supply water, the Wari carved a fifteen-mile canal through the mountains from the
peaks to the bottom of Cerro Baúl, an engineering feat that would be a challenge today.
“And even that got water only to the bottom of the hill,” Williams told me. “After that, it
was bucket brigades.” As I huffed and puffed on the wickedly steep, thirty-minute hike to
the summit, he invited me to imagine a continuous line of servants exchanging ceramic
jugs (slopping, brimful ones going up; light, empty ones going down) along the path,
working day in and day out to provide water for the priests and princes above.
Small, rudely fashioned models of farmhouses and farmyards covered the top of
the butte. Most of the models simply outlined walls, fences, and doors with loose stones,
but some were elaborate constructions complete with plastic model cars, toy animals, and
thatch roofs. People were climbing Cerro Baúl, building their maquettes, and praying that
the heavens would give them the real-life equivalents. The miniature farms extended for
hundreds of yards in all directions. Here and there, makeshift crosses and pictures of
saints added a veneer of Catholicism to indigenous Andean belief. Some of the ruined
Wari walls were covered with ruined model walls. “This is getting out of hand,” Williams
said. “I don’t want to knock down somebody’s dream house to get to an archaeological
site.”
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WARI AND TIWANAKU, 700 A.D.
In about 750 A.D., about a century after Wari came to Cerro Baúl, Tiwanaku
groups infiltrated the region around it. In most places on earth, this encounter would have
been fraught with tension. And perhaps if Tiwanaku had been more like Wari there
would have been immediate war. But Tiwanaku was so different in so many ways that
ordinary expectations rarely apply to it. The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has
half-jokingly suggested that all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which
the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist, in which government
is viewed as an expression of the people’s will; “great beast,” in which the rulers’ power
depends on using force to keep the populace cowed; and “great fraud,” in which the elite
uses smoke and mirrors to convince the people of its inherent authority. Every state is a
mix of all of these elements, but in Tiwanaku, the proportion of “great fraud” may have
been especially high. Nonetheless, Tiwanaku endured for many centuries.
Tiwanaku’s capital, Tiwanaku city, was at the southwest end of Lake Titicaca.
Situated at 12,600 feet, it was the highest city in the ancient world. Today visitors from
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lower altitudes are constantly warned that the area is very cold. “Bring warm clothing,”
Williams advised me in Cerro Baúl. “You’re going to freeze.” The warnings puzzled me,
because Lake Titicaca, which is big enough to stay at a near-constant 51 degrees
Fahrenheit, moderates the local climate (this is one reason why agriculture is possible at
such height). On winter nights the average temperature is a degree below freezing—cold,
but not any colder than New England, and considerably warmer than one would expect at
12,600 feet. Only when I traveled there did I realize that this was the temperature
indoors. The modern town of Tiwanaku is a poor place and few of its buildings have any
heating. One night there I attended a performance at a family circus that was touring the
Andes. It was so cold inside the tent that for the first few minutes the audience was
shrouded in a cloud of its own breath. My host that night was an American archaeologist.
When I woke the next morning in her spare bedroom, my host, in parka, hat, and gloves,
was melting water on her stove. The cold does not detract from the area’s beauty:
Tiwanaku sits in the middle of a plain ringed by ice-capped mountains. From the ruin’s
taller buildings the great lake, almost ten miles to the northwest, is just visible. The wide
expanse of water seems to merge into the sky without a welt.
The first important settlement around Titicaca was likely Chiripa, on a little
peninsula on the lake’s southwest coast. Its ceremonial center, which may date to 900
B.C., was built around a Norte Chico–style sunken plaza. Chiripa was one of half a dozen
small, competitive centers that emerged around the lake in that time. Most depended on
raised-field agriculture, in which farmers grow crops on flat, artificially constructed
surfaces created for the same reason that home gardeners grow vegetables on raised beds.
(Similar but even larger expanses of raised fields are found in the Beni, the Mexican
basin, and many other places.) By the time of Christ’s birth, two of these early polities
had become dominant: Pukara on the northern, Peruvian edge of the lake and Tiwanaku
on the opposite, Bolivian side. In the third century A.D., Pukara rather abruptly
disintegrated politically. People still lived there, but the towns dispersed into the
countryside; pottery making, stela carving, and monument building ceased. No one is
certain why.
Although Tiwanaku has been occupied since at least 800 B.C., it did not become
an important center until about 300 B.C. and did not expand out from southern Titicaca
until about two hundred years after Pukara’s decline. But when it did reach out to its
south and west, Tiwanaku transformed itself to become what Alan Kolata, an
archaeologist at the University of Chicago, has called a “predatory state.” It was not the
centrally administered military power that term conjures. Instead, it was an archipelago of
cities that acknowledged Tiwanaku’s religious preeminence. “State religion and imperial
ideology,” Kolata argued, “performed much the same work as military conquest, but at
significantly lower cost.” Awed by its magnificence, fearful of the supernatural powers
controlled by its priesthood, local rulers subordinated themselves.
Central to this strategy of intimidation was Tiwanaku city. A past wonder of the
world, it is badly damaged today. In the last two centuries, people have literally carted
away many of its buildings, using the stones for churches, homes, bridges, public
buildings, and even landfill. At one point the Bolivian government drove a railroad
through the site (recently it laid a road through another part). Hands more enthusiastic
than knowledgeable reconstructed many of the remaining buildings. Still, enough remains
to get a sense of the ancient city.
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Dominating its skyline was a seven-tiered pyramid, Akapana, laid out in a pattern
perhaps inspired by the Andean cross. Ubiquitous in highlands art, the Andean cross is a
stepped shape that some claim is inspired by the Southern Cross constellation and others
believe represents the four quarters of the world. Whatever the case, Akapana’s builders
planned with a sense of drama. They constructed its base walls with sandstone blocks, the
array interrupted every ten feet by rectangular stone pillars that are easily ten feet tall. So
massive are the pillars that the first European to see Tiwanaku, Pedro Cieza de León,
later confessed himself unable to “understand or fathom what kind of instruments or tools
were used to work them.” Rising from the center of a large moat, Akapana mimicked the
surrounding mountains. A precisely engineered drainage system added to the similarity
by channeling water from a cistern-like well at the summit down and along the sides, a
stylized version of rainwater plashing down the Andes.
The Andean cross
Atop an adjacent, somewhat smaller structure, a large, walled enclosure called
Kalasasaya, is the so-called Gateway of the Sun, cut from a single block of stone (now
broken in two and reassembled). Covered with a fastidiously elaborate frieze, the
twelve-foot gateway focuses the visitor’s eye on the image of a single deity whose figure
projects from the lintel: the Staff God.
Today the Gateway of the Sun is the postcard emblem of Tiwanaku. During the
winter solstice (June, in South America) hundreds of camera-toting European and
American tourists wait on Kalasasaya through the entire freezing night for the sunrise,
which is supposed to shine through the Gateway on that date alone. Guides in traditional
costume explain that the reliefs on the lintel form an intricate astronomical calendar that
may have been brought to earth by alien beings. To keep themselves warm during the
inevitable longueurs, visitors sing songs of peace and harmony in several languages.
Invariably the spectators are stunned when the first light of sunrise appears well to the
side of the Gateway. Only afterward do they discover that the portal is not in its original
location, and may have had nothing to do with astronomy or calendars.
If those tourists had come to Tiwanaku at its height, walking through the miles of
raised fields surrounding it to the city’s carefully fitted stone walls, they would have been
delighted by its splendor. But it might also have seemed curiously incomplete, with half
the city falling down and in need of repairs and the other half under construction. Modern
drawings of ancient cities tend to show them at an imagined apogee, the great monuments
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all splendidly arrayed together, perfect as architectural models. But this is not what
Tiwanaku looked like, nor even what it was meant to look like, according to Isbell and
Vranich. From the very beginning, the two men wrote in 2004, the city was partly in
ruins—intentionally so, because the fallen walls bequeathed on Tiwanaku the authority of
the past. Meanwhile, other parts of the city were constantly enveloped in construction
projects, which testified to the continued wealth and vitality of the state. Sometimes these
projects acquired construction materials by cannibalizing old monuments, thereby
hastening the process of creating ruins. In the Andean tradition, labor was probably
contributed by visiting work parties. Periodically ritual feasts that included much
smashing of pottery interrupted the hubbub of construction. But it always continued.
“They build their monuments as if their intent was never to finish them,” the Spanish
academic Polo de Ondegardo marveled in 1571. Exactly right, Isbell and Vranich said.
Completion was not the object. The goal was a constant buzz of purposeful activity.
As our hypothetical modern visitors wandered through the hurly-burly of
construction and deconstruction, they might have felt that despite the commotion
something was missing. Unlike Western cities, Tiwanaku had no markets—no bazaars
full of shouting, bargaining, conniving entrepreneurs; no street displays of produce,
pottery, and plonk; no jugglers and mimes trying to attract crowds; no pickpockets. In
Africa, Asia, and Europe, Kolata wrote, “a city was a place of meeting and of melding for
many different kinds of people…. Through trade and exchange, through buying and
selling of every conceivable kind, the city was made and remade.” Tiwanaku was utterly
different. Andean societies were based on the widespread exchange of goods and
services, but kin and government, not market forces, directed the flow. The citizenry
grew its own food and made its own clothes, or obtained them through their lineages, or
picked them up in government warehouses. And the city, as Kolata put it, was a place for
“symbolically concentrating the political and religious authority of the elite.” Other
Andean cities, Wari among them, shared this quality. But Tiwanaku carried it to an
extreme.
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On Lake Titicaca, the reed boats known as totora are still in use, as they have
been for two thousand years. This replica of a large totora was built in 2001 to prove the
vessels could have hauled the big stones used in Tiwanaku’s walls.
The so-called Gateway of the Sun attracts pilgrims by the thousands who seek
astronomical meaning in its location. Unfortunately, it was moved to its present site in the
twentieth century.
Tiwanaku has been excavated for a century, and the more archaeologists delve
into it the less there seems to be. To Vranich, the capital’s lack of resemblance to
European imperial cities extends well beyond the absence of marketplaces. Far from
being the powerful administrative center envisioned by earlier researchers, he says,
Tiwanaku was a combination of the Vatican and Disneyland, a religious show capital
with a relatively small population—almost a staff— that attracted pilgrims by the
thousand. Like the tourists at the solstice today, visitors came to this empire of
appearances to be dazzled and awed. “In the central city, buildings and monuments went
up and down, up and down, at an incredible rate,” Vranich told me at Tiwanaku, where
he had been working since 1996. “Nothing ever got finished completely, because they
were just concerned with the facades. They had to keep changing the exhibits to keep the
crowds coming.”
The encounter between Tiwanaku and Wari at Cerro Baúl seems to have gone
remarkably smoothly. At any rate, a study of more than a thousand Wari and Tiwanaku
graves found no evidence of the trauma associated with violence. Instead, the two
societies split the region between them. Wari camped atop Cerro Baúl and a neighboring
hillock, Cerro Mejía. Between them was a steep valley with Tiwanaku settlements
scattered throughout. Because Wari and Tiwanaku pottery differed, Williams and Nash
have been able to map which group lived in which neighborhood by the distribution of
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ceramic fragments. The Wari canal provided drinking water, but had to pass through
Tiwanaku territory at the base of Cerro Baúl. Tiwanaku let the water through, but took
enough to irrigate more than seven hundred acres of terraces.
At the same time, Wari and Tiwanaku kept themselves separate. Although they
shared resources, there is little evidence that people from one culture visited the other
often, or had friendships across the political lines. Wari homes were furnished with Wari
goods; Tiwanaku homes, Tiwanaku goods. Despite living next to each other, people
continued to speak their different languages and wear their different clothing and look for
inspiration and instruction from their different capitals. The social-science word for such
intermingling without intermixing is “interdigitization.” For two centuries at Cerro Baúl,
Wari and Tiwanaku were like people in parallel worlds, sharing the same time and space
but implacably separate from each other. It is a small reminder that Indians were neither
the peaceful, love-thy-neighbor types envisioned by some apologists or the brutal,
ceaselessly aggressive warriors decried by some political critics.
The end came in about 800 A.D., Williams told me. He was part of a
Peruvian-American team that in 2005 reconstructed Cerro Baúl’s last days. As many as
twenty-eight high-ranking nobles and priests gathered in the Wari colony’s biggest palace
for a final feast at a great reception hall, thirty feet on a side, each wall lined with a
stone-faced bench. The chamber opened onto what the archaeologists believed “was
likely the chief executive’s office for conducting statecraft,” the Andean equivalent of the
Oval Office in the White House. To judge by the scattered food remains, the goodbye
party was a Rabelaisian affair, with platters of llama, alpaca, vizcacha (Andean hare), and
seven types of fish, all washed down with fresh chicha, this last being served in huge
ceremonial mugs, many heraldically decorated, that held up to half a gallon apiece of
brew. At the end the drunken crew staggered through the palace, smashing the crockery
and setting the whole place afire. “It looks like they had a really wild time of it,”
Williams said. Last to go was the chicha brewery with its elite female staff. The lords
torched the thatched milling room and then threw their great mugs into the flames.
“Later, when the embers had cooled,” archaeologists wrote, “six necklaces of shell and
stone were placed atop the ashes in a final act of reverence.”
The retreat was part of a general fall. Tiwanaku may have declined first, leading
Wari to shut down its embassy in Cerro Baúl. Or perhaps Wari was pulling back for its
own internal reasons. Both declines have been laid to drought, but this is contested. For
one thing, Wari had already survived drought. As for Tiwanaku, Vranich said, “How
much would drought matter to Disneyland?” Its ability to retain its audience would be far
more important.
The successors to both Wari and Tiwanaku combined the former’s organizational
skills and the latter’s sense of design and razzle-dazzle. First came Chimor, then the
greatest empire ever seen in Peru. Spread at its greatest extent over seven hundred miles
of the coastline, Chimor was an ambitious state that grew maize and cotton by irrigating
almost fifty thousand acres around the Moche River (all of modern Peru only reached that
figure in 1960). A destructive El Niño episode in about 1100 A.D. made irrigation
impossible for a while. In response, the government forced gangs of captive laborers to
build a fifty-three-mile, masonry-lined canal to channel water from the Chicama River, in
the next valley to the north, to farmland in the Moche Valley. The canal was a flop: some
parts ran uphill, apparently because of incompetent engineering, and the rest lost
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nine-tenths of its water to evaporation and seepage. Some archaeologists believe that the
canal was never meant to function. It was a PR exercise, they say, a Potemkin
demonstration by the Chimor government that it was actively fighting El Niño.
When the bad weather ended, Chimor looked outside its borders. Armies went out
and returned victorious to Chan Chan, the Chimor capital, a seaside metropolis with a
dense center that covered four square miles. Dominated by nine high-walled imperial
palace-tombs and five cathedral-like ceremonial complexes, the city was both exemplary
in its grandeur and oddly empty, because its streets were restricted to the elite.
Commoners were barred, except for a few specialized technicians and craftworkers. Each
palace was hundreds of feet on a side and many were three stories tall. They were filled
with storage space—living quarters were almost an afterthought. Their great beams
adorned with splendidly worked gold and silver, the huge structures were jammed
together around the center of town like people huddling in the shelter of an awning.
Chan Chan suffered a palace surfeit because dead rulers were regarded as divine
figures. As with the Inka, the kings’ mummified bodies continued to live opulently in
their own homes and could not be displaced; indeed, the mummies were necessary
presences at important state occasions. As a result, each new ruler had to build his own
palace and acquire the riches necessary to maintain it till the end of time. The system
almost guaranteed imperial ambitions and exuberant construction plans.
The biggest of Chan Chan’s surviving palaces may have belonged to
Minchaçaman—the eleventh king in the Chimor dynasty, according to one Spanish
account—who reputedly conquered much of the coastline. Minchaçaman was a powerful
figure who could have taken over even more land than he did. Unfortunately for him, he
lived at the same time that a previously little-known group, the Inka, acquired a new
ruler, Pachakuti. In about 1450 the Inka army, led by Qhapaq Yupanki, Pachakuti’s
brother, besieged the city-state of Cajamarca, in the foothills east of Chimor. Cajamarca’s
leader had allied himself with Minchaçaman, who rushed to his aid with an army. He
does not seem to have known what he was in for, possibly because he viewed the Inka as
a gang of rustic thugs. Qhapaq Yupanki awaited him in an ambush. Minchaçaman and his
army were forced to flee as Cajamarca fell to the Inka. Qhapaq Yupanki covered himself
with so much glory that when he returned home to Qosqo his brother, sensing future
trouble, promptly executed him.
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In this rare aerial photograph—taken in 1931, before modern looting blasted the
site—the ruined Chimor capital of Chan Chan sprawls across the northern Peruvian coast.
One of the wonders of the fifteenth-century world, Chan Chan abruptly fell to the Inka in
about 1450; eighty years later, Spanish diseases and Spanish soldiers destroyed much of
what had survived the Inka.
A decade or so later—in 1463, if Spanish chronicles are correct—the emperor
sent out another army led by his son and designated successor, Thupa Inka Yupanki. By
that time nobody thought of the Inkas as hicks. Thupa Inka descended the Moche River
and paralyzed Chimor’s defenses by the simple expedient of threatening to destroy its
water supply. Minchaçaman was captured, taken to Qosqo, and forced to watch Thupa
Inka’s victory celebration. Chimor’s conquerors were quick studies. Liking the courtly
magnificence of Chan Chan, they hauled away what they could and, more important,
forced the city’s gold, silver, and gem workers to accompany them to Qosqo. They were
instructed to transform the city into a new Chan Chan, only more impressive. Seven
decades later, when Pizarro held his victory celebration in Qosqo, it was equal in
grandeur to any city in Europe.
MAKING THE WAK’A
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Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer took me to Caballete, a narrow, dusty bowl,
perhaps half a mile long and a quarter mile wide, a few miles up the Fortaleza River from
the Peruvian coast. At the mouth of the bowl were three mounds in a rough semicircle
that faced a fourth mound. In front of one mound, like a one-eighth scale model of
Stonehenge, was a ragged circle of wak’a: sacred stones. Not far from the wak’a looters
had dug up an ancient graveyard, pulling out the bodies and unwinding them from their
sheets in a search for gold and jewels. When they didn’t find any, they threw the bones
down in disgust. In a square perhaps fifty yards on a side the ground was carpeted with
broken human bones and scraps of thousand-year-old fabric.
We walked a little further and were greeted by a curious sight: skulls from the
cemetery, gathered into several small piles. Around them were beer cans, cigarette butts,
patent-medicine bottles, half-burned photographs, and candles shaped like naked women.
These last had voodoo pins stuck in their heads and vaginas. Local people came to these
places at night and either dug for treasure or practiced witchcraft, Haas said. In the harsh
afternoon light they seemed to me tacky and sad. I imagined that the families of the
people who had been buried at Caballete so long ago would have been outraged if they
could have known what would happen to the bodies of their loved ones.
The history of Andean societies is so rich and complex that it often leaves
archaeologists feeling overwhelmed—there is so much to learn that they can never keep
up. A single example: scientists did not confirm the existence of the Great Wall of Peru, a
forty-mile stone rampart across the Andes, until the 1930s. And it still has never been
fully excavated.
But then it occurred to me that my views may not have been shared by either the
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present or the past inhabitants of Norte Chico. I had no idea what people in Wari or
Chimor would have thought of the scene before me. So far in this section, I have mainly
described the economic and political history of Andean Indians. But people live also in
the realm of the affective and aesthetic—that’s why they bury bodies and sometimes dig
them up and pour love potions on them. Despite all the knowledge gained by scientists in
the last few decades, this emotional realm remains much harder to reach.
An obvious example on the southern coast is the Nazca, famous for the huge
patterns they set into the ground. Figures of animals and plants, almost a thousand
geometric symbols, arrow-straight lines many miles long—what were they for? Peruvian
anthropologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe first brought these famous drawings to the attention
of the outside world in 1927. Four decades later, the Swiss writer Erich von Däniken set
off an international furor by claiming that the Nazca Indians could not have made these
symbols, because they were too big for such “primitive” people to construct, and because
they are visible only from the air. Instead, he said, the giant figures were landing signals
for space travelers; the whole plain was a sort of gigantic extraterrestrial airport.
Expanded in a series of bestselling books, this notion turned the lines into a major tourist
attraction. Exasperated scientists pointed out that a) small groups could have constructed
the images by moving the dark surface stone to expose the lighter-colored earth beneath,
and b) the Nazca did not have to see the figures to experience them, for they can be
understood by walking the lines, which it is believed the Indians did. The prevailing
theory today is that the straight lines mapped out the area’s many underground faults,
which channel water. But nobody knows why the Nazca made the animal and plant
figures, which seem less likely to have a direct function. What were the Nazca thinking
as they created them? How did they feel when they walked them? To this day, the
answers remain frustratingly far away.
Or consider the Moche, leaders of a military state that overran much of the
northern coast, submerging the identities of its victims in its own. Huaca del Sol, the
Moche capital, contains the largest adobe structure in the Andes, still hauntingly
evocative despite centuries of systematic looting. (Unwilling to laboriously dig their way
through the palace’s tombs, the Spaniards diverted the Moche River through it, washing
out the riches in orthodox Augean-stable style; contemporary thieves have contented
themselves with picks and shovels.) After about 300 A.D., Moche artists confined
themselves to perhaps half a dozen subjects, painting stories of supernatural figures on
pottery and murals with ever more naturalistic technique. Actors reenacted the same
stories in grand pageants and ritual celebrations. Individual combat is a common theme;
losers were formally stripped of their garments and forced to parade naked. Another
oft-repeated tale involves the death and burial of a regal figure. Many of the people in the
paintings are sharply individuated. Great effort has gone into studying the Moche, but as
Moseley says, their identities and motives often remain “elusive.” The Moche polity
broke up around 800 A.D., taking with it our chance to understand.
One of the few moments when I imagined I could encompass something of the
inner lives of these long-ago people occurred in Chavín de Huantar, a city of several
thousand people that existed between about 800 B.C. and 200 A.D. Its most important
feature, a ceremonial temple shaped in a Norte Chico–style U, was a masterpiece of
architectural intimidation. Using a network of concealed vents and channels, priests piped
loud, roaring sounds at those who entered the temple. Visitors walked up three flights of
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stairs, growls echoing around them, and into a long, windowless passageway. At the end
of the corridor, in a cross-shaped room that flickered with torchlight, was a
fifteen-foot-high stone figure with a catlike face, taloned fingers, fierce tusks, and
Medusa hair. Nobody today is sure of the god’s identity. Immediately above it, hidden
from visitors’ eyes, sat a priestly functionary, who provided the god’s voice. After the
long, torchlit approach, walking straight into the gaze of the snarling deity, mysterious
bellows reverberating off the stone, the oracular declamation from above must have been
spine-chilling.
Most of the complex is open to tourists. Many of the sculptures have been put into
museums; others presumably have been looted. Yet walking into the temple still felt to
me like entering a mountain of solid rock. Over and over again, Andean stories tell of
spirits embodied in stones and giants transformed into natural features. The landscape has
an intricate numinous geography; it is charged with meaning that must be respected and
heeded. The earth, in this view, is not something to be left alone; the wak’a that litter
Peruvian anthropological sites are often partly sculpted, as if they had needed some
human attention to manifest their sacred qualities. Thus the human-made tunnels into the
temple were part of what made it embody the power of a mountain. As I walked down the
dimly lighted corridor toward where the torchlit deity had stood, my fingers ran along the
walls created by Chavín craftworkers. They were fit beautifully into place and as cold
and hard as the mountains they came from. But they did not gain their power without my
hand to close the circuit. The natural world is incomplete without the human touch.
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PART THREE
Landscape with Figures
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Made in America
ENTERING THE WATER
At some point, Chak Tok Ich’aak must have realized that January 14, 378 A.D.,
would be his last day on earth. The king of Mutal, the biggest and most cosmopolitan
city-state in the Maya world, he lived and worked in a sprawling castle a few hundred
yards away from the great temples at the city’s heart. (Now known as Tikal, the ruins of
Mutal have become an international tourist attraction.) Audience seekers entered the
castle through a set of three richly carved doors in its eastern wall. Inside was a receiving
room where petitioners waited for the king’s attention. An inner portal led to a torch-lit
chamber, where Chak Tok Ich’aak, flanked by counselors and minions, reclined on an
*23
ornate bench. On that bench is, quite possibly, where he met his fate.
Like most Maya rulers, Chak Tok Ich’aak spent a lot of his time luxuriating in his
court while dwarf servants attended to his whims and musicians played conch shells and
wooden trumpets in the background. But he also excelled at such regal duties as
performing ritual public dances, sending out trade expeditions in search of luxury goods,
and fighting wars—a celebratory stela has Chak Tok Ich’aak personally stomping a
manacled POW. In another portrait, a bas-relief, the king is depicted as an alert man with
a long breechclout and a jeweled mass of necklaces, bracelets, anklets, and pendants
clicking and clattering about his person. Towering a foot over his skull was an elaborate
headdress in the shape of a bird of prey, complete with swirling plumage. Like most
Maya art, the portrait is too stylized to regard as a naturalistic rendering. Nonetheless, it
effectively makes its point: Chak Tok Ich’aak was a major historical figure.
Mutal (modern Tikal) and the huge city-empire of Teotihuacan had trade
relations—peaceful, so far as is known—that dated back to 200 A.D. Matters abruptly
changed in January 378, when a force led by the Teotihuacan general Siyaj K’ak’ arrived
in the court of the Mutal king Chak Tok Ich’aak. As depicted on a painting wrapped
around a Mutal vase, the foreign soldiers, shown with bundles of spears and atlatls,
marched away from a Teotihuacan-style building (above) and confronted the lightly clad
Mutalking on the steps of his palace (near left). The outcome of the meeting—Chak Tok
Ich’aak’s death—may be hinted at in the final image (far left), in which longhaired Maya
pay their respects to an empty pyramid.
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By combining scraps of data on several inscriptions, archaeologists have
calculated that Chak Tok Ich’aak probably acceded to the throne in 360 A.D. At the time,
the Maya realm consisted of sixty or so small, jostling statelets scattered across what is
now northern Belize and Guatemala and the Yucatán Peninsula. Mutal was older and
wealthier than most, but otherwise not strikingly different. Chak Tok Ich’aak changed
that. During the eighteen years of his reign, the city acquired diplomatic stature and
commercial clout; its population grew to perhaps ten thousand and it established trade
contacts throughout Mesoamerica. As it prospered, Mutal attracted considerable
attention—which, in the end, may have been the king’s undoing.
Marching toward him that January day was an armed force from Teotihuacan, 630
miles to the west. Already in control of most of central Mexico, Teotihuacan was looking
for new lands to dominate. Leading the expedition was one Siyaj K’ak’, apparently a
trusted general or counselor to the ruler of Teotihuacan. Four Maya cities along Siyaj
K’ak’’s path recorded his progress in murals, panel paintings, and stelae. Texts and
images depict the Teotihuacanos as gaudily martial figures with circular mirrors strapped
to their backs and squared-off helmets sweeping protectively in front of the jaw. They
were bare-chested but wore fringed leggings and heavy shell necklaces and high-strapped
sandals. In their hands were atlatls and obsidian darts to throw with them. Painted panels
in one city show Maya soldiers in jaguar uniforms rushing to attack the visitors, but in
fact it seems unlikely that any of the small settlements between Teotihuacan and Mutal
would have dared to harass them.
No detailed description of the encounter between Siyaj K’ak’ and Chak Tok
Ich’aak exists, but it is known that discussion did not go on for long. They two men met
on January 14, 378 A.D. On that same day Chak Tok Ich’aak “entered the water,”
according to an account carved on a later stela. The Maya saw the afterworld as a kind of
endless, foggy sea. “Entering the water” was thus a euphemism on the order of “passed
on to a better place.” Readers of the stela would understand that Chak Tok Ich’aak’s old
heart had quietly stopped beating after Siyaj K’ak’ or one of his troops slipped a blade
into it. Likely the rest of his family perished, as well as anyone else who objected. In any
case no one seems to have complained when Siyaj K’ak’ established a new dynasty at
Mutal by installing the son of his Teotihuacan master on the vacant throne.
Chak Tok Ich’aak’s death began a tumultuous period in Mesoamerican history.
The new, Teotihuacan-backed dynasty at Mutal drove the city to further heights of power
and prestige. Inevitably, its expansion was resented. A northern city-state, Kaan (now
known as Calakmul), conscripted an army from its client states and launched a series of
attacks. The ensuing strife lasted 150 years, spread across the Maya heartland, and
resulted in the pillage of a dozen city-states, among them both Mutal and Kaan. After
suffering repeated losses, Mutal unexpectedly defeated the superior forces of Kaan,
possibly killing its king to boot. The beaten, humiliated Kaan lost the support of its
vassals and was reduced to penury.
Mutal once again reclaimed its heritage from imperial Teotihuacan. But its
triumph, though long sought, was short-lived. In one of archaeology’s most enduring
mysteries, Maya civilization crumbled around it within a century. After a final flash of
imperial splendor, the city joined Kaan and most central Maya cities in obscurity and
ruin. By about 900 A.D., both Mutal and Kaan stood almost empty, along with dozens of
other Maya cities. And soon even the few people who still lived there had forgotten their
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imperial glories.
“GETTING ALONG WITH NATURE”
Why did the Maya abandon all their cities?
“No words are more calculated to strike dismay in the hearts of Maya
archaeologists,” the Maya archaeologist David Webster confessed in 2002. Webster, a
researcher at Pennsylvania State University, admitted that during his “incautious younger
years” he often told fellow airplane passengers that he was flying to work “at some
ancient Maya center. Then, with utter predictability, [would come] the dreaded question.
Nowadays, older and wiser, I usually mutter something vague about ‘business’ and then
bury my nose in the airline magazine.”
One reason Webster avoided the question is its scope. Asking what happened to
the ancient Maya is like asking what happened in the Cold War—the subject is so big that
one hardly knows where to begin. At the same time, that very sweep is why the Maya
collapse has fascinated archaeologists since the 1840s, when the outside world first
learned of the abandoned cities in Yucatán. Today we know that the fall was not quite as
rapid, dramatic, and widespread as earlier scholars believed. Nevertheless, according to
Billie Lee Turner, a geographer at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, it was
unique in world history. Cultures rise and fall, but there is no other known time when a
large-scale society disintegrated—and was replaced by nothing. “When the Roman
Empire fell apart,” he said, “Italy didn’t empty out—no cities, no major societies—for
more than a thousand years. But the Maya heartland did just that.” What happened?
In the 1930s, Sylvanus G. Morley of Harvard, probably the most celebrated
Mayanist of his day, espoused what is still the best-known theory: The Maya collapsed
because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their
resource base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving
them as silent warnings of the perils of ecological hubris.
When Morley proposed his theory, it was little more than a hunch. Since then,
though, scientific measurements, mainly of pollen in lake sediments, have shown that the
Maya did cut down much of the region’s forest, using the wood for fuel and the land for
agriculture. The loss of tree cover would have caused large-scale erosion and floods.
With their fields disappearing beneath their feet and a growing population to feed, Maya
farmers were forced to exploit ever more marginal terrain with ever more intensity. The
tottering system was vulnerable to the first good push, which came in the form of a
century-long dry spell that hit Yucatán between about 800 and 900 A.D. Social
disintegration followed soon thereafter.
Recounted in numberless articles and books, the Maya collapse has become an
ecological parable for green activists; along with Pleistocene overkill, it is a favorite
cautionary tale about surpassing the limits of Nature. The Maya “were able to build a
complex society capable of great cultural and intellectual achievements, but they ended
up destroying what they created,” Clive Ponting wrote in his influential Green History of
the World (1991). Following the implications of the Maya fall, he asked, “Are
contemporary societies any better at controlling the drive toward ever greater use of
resources and heavier pressure on the environment? Is humanity too confident about its
ability to avoid ecological disaster?” The history of these Indians, Ponting and others
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have suggested, has much to teach us today.
Curiously, though, environmentalists also describe Native American history as
embodying precisely the opposite lesson: how to live in a spiritual balance with Nature.
Bookstore shelves groan beneath the weight of titles like Sacred Ecology, Guardians of
the Earth, Mother Earth Spirituality, and Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The
Interbeing of Cosmology and Community. So strongly endorsed is this view of Native
Americans that checklists exist to judge whether books correctly depict their
environmental values. The Native Cultures Authenticity Guideline, for instance, assesses
the portrayal of the “Five Great Values” shared by all “the major Native cultures”
(including, one assumes, the Maya), one of which is “Getting Along with
Nature”—“respecting the sacred natural harmony of and with Nature.” To be historically
accurate, according to the guidelines, major native cultures must be shown displaying “a
proper reverence for the gift of life.”
Indians as poster children for eco-catastrophe, Indians as green role models: the
two images contradict each other less than they seem. Both are variants of Holmberg’s
Mistake, the idea that Indians were suspended in time, touching nothing and untouched
themselves, like ghostly presences on the landscape. The first two sections of this book
were devoted to two different ways that researchers have recently repudiated this
perspective. I showed that they have raised their estimates of indigenous populations in
1492, and their reasons for it; and then why most researchers now believe that Indian
societies have been here longer than had been imagined, and grew more complex and
technologically accomplished than previously thought. In this section I treat another facet
of Holmberg’s Mistake: the idea that native cultures did not or could not control their
environment. The view that Indians left no footprint on the land is an obvious example.
That they marched heedlessly to tragedy is a subtler one. Both depict indigenous people
as passively accepting whatever is meted out to them, whether it is the fruits of
undisturbed ecosystems or the punishment for altering them.
Native Americans’ interactions with their environments were as diverse as Native
Americans themselves, but they were always the product of a specific historical process.
Occasionally researchers can detail that process with some precision, as in the case of the
Maya. More often one can see only the outlines of history, as in the reconfiguration of the
eastern half of the United States. These two paradigmatic examples are the subjects I turn
to now. In both, Indians worked on a very large scale, transforming huge swathes of the
landscape for their own ends. Sifting through the evidence, it is apparent that many
though not all Indians were superbly active land managers—they did not live lightly on
the land. And they do have lessons to teach us, but they are not what are commonly
supposed.
FIRE PLACE
Adriaen van der Donck was a lawyer who in 1641 transplanted himself to the
Hudson River Valley, then part of the Dutch colony of Nieuw Nederland. He became a
kind of prosecutor and bill collector for the Dutch West India Company, which owned
and operated the colony as a private fiefdom. Whenever possible, van der Donck ignored
his duties and tramped around the forests and valleys upstate. He spent a lot of time with
the Haudenosaunee, whose insistence on personal liberty fascinated him. They were, he
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wrote, “all free by nature, and will not bear any domineering or lording over them.”
When a committee of settlers decided to complain to the government about the
Dutch West India Company’s dictatorial behavior, it asked van der Donck, the only
lawyer in New Amsterdam, to compose a protest letter and travel with it to The Hague.
His letter set down the basic rights that in his view belonged to everyone on American
soil—the first formal call for liberty in the colonies. It is tempting to speculate that van
der Donck drew inspiration from the attitudes of the Haudenosaunee.
The Dutch government responded to the letter by taking control of New
Amsterdam from the Dutch West India Company and establishing an independent
governing body in Manhattan, thereby setting into motion the creation of New York City.
Angered by their loss of power, the company directors effectively prevented van der
Donck’s return for five years. While languishing in Europe, he wrote a nostalgic
pamphlet extolling the land he had come to love.
Every fall, he remembered, the Haudenosaunee set fire to “the woods, plains, and
meadows,” to “thin out and clear the woods of all dead substances and grass, which grow
better the ensuing spring.” At first the wildfire had scared him, but over time van der
Donck had come to relish the spectacle of the yearly burning. “Such a fire is a splendid
sight when one sails on the [Hudson and Mohawk] rivers at night while the forest is
ablaze on both banks,” he recalled. With the forest burning to the right and the left, the
colonists’ boats passed through a channel of fire, their passengers as goggle-eyed at the
blaze as children at a video arcade. “Fire and flames are seen everywhere and on all
sides…a delightful scene to look on from afar.”
Van der Donck believed that North America was only “several hundred miles”
across, and apparently assumed that all its inhabitants were exactly like the
Haudenosaunee. He was wrong about the first belief, but in a sense correct about the
second: from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Hudson’s Bay to the Río Grande, the
Haudenosaunee and almost every other Indian group shaped their environment, at least in
part, by fire.
Early in the last century, ecologists discovered the phenomenon of “succession,”
the more or less well-defined sequence by which ecosystems fill in open land. A textbook
example occurred after the eruption in 1980 of Mount St. Helens, in southern Washington
State, which inundated more than two hundred square miles with magma, volcanic ash,
and mud. Surviving plants sprang quickly to life, sometimes resprouting within weeks.
Then colonizing species like lupine appeared, preparing the ground for the return of the
grasses. Fifteen years after the eruption, the ravaged slopes were dotted with trees and
woody shrubs: red alder, lodgepole pine, willow bush. Here and there gleamed the waxy
red boles of madrone. Forest giants like hemlock, Douglas fir, and Sitka spruce waited in
the wings. In the classic successional course, each suite of plants replaces its predecessor,
until the arrival of the final, “climax” ecosystem, usually tall forest.
If ecological succession were unstoppable, the continents would be covered by
climax-stage vegetation: a world of great trees, dark and silent. Early-succession species
would have vanished. Luckily for these species, succession is often interrupted—Nature
does not move in lockstep. Windstorms, lightning fires, landslides, volcanic eruptions,
and other natural calamities knock down trees and open up the forest, or prevent open
country from turning into forestland. A few years or decades of tranquility may see
grasses replaced by shrubs and trees which are in turn flattened by a violent
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thunderstorm, permitting the grass to thrive again. After a while, the shrubs and trees
return, only to be wiped out by a flood. And so on. Different types of disturbance shape
different ecosystems: floods in the Nile, landslides on the steep pitches of the Andes,
hurricanes in the Yucatán Peninsula. For more than ten thousand years, most North
American ecosystems have been dominated by fire.
In the Greek myth of Prometheus the gift of fire forever severs humankind from
the natural world—the burning torch is the icon of the constructed and artificial. On the
mundane, factual level, though, this resonant tale is wrong: Nature has always used fire
as a mallet to beat landscapes into other forms. Prometheus only helped human beings to
pick up the handle. “The earth,” wrote the pioneering fire ecologist Edward V. Komarek,
“born in fire, baptized by lightning, since before life’s beginning has been and is, a fire
planet.” Set off by lightning, wildfires reset the ecological clock, dialing the array of
plants and animals back a few successional stages. Fire benefits plants that need sunlight,
while inhibiting those that love the cool gloaming of the forest floor; it encourages the
animals that need those plants even as it discourages others; in turn, predator populations
rise and fall. In this way fire regulates ecological character.
Fire is a dominating factor in many if not most terrestrial landscapes. It has two
main sources: lightning and Homo sapiens. In North America, lightning fire is most
common in the western mountains. Elsewhere, though, Indians controlled it—at least
until contact, and in many places long after. In the Northeast, Indians always carried a
deerskin pouch full of flints, Thomas Morton reported in 1637, which they used “to set
fire of the country in all places where they come.” The flints ignited torches, which were
as important to the hunt as bows and arrows. Deer in the Northeast; alligators in the
Everglades; buffalo in the prairies; grasshoppers in the Great Basin; rabbits in California;
moose in Alaska: all were pursued by fire. Native Americans made big rings of flame,
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “by firing the leaves fallen on the ground, which, gradually
forcing animals to the center, they there slaughter them with arrows, darts, and other
missiles.” Not that Indians always used fire for strictly utilitarian purposes. At nightfall
tribes in the Rocky Mountains entertained the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William
Clark by applying torches to sap-dripping fir trees, which then exploded like Roman
candles.
Rather than domesticate animals for meat, Indians retooled ecosystems to
encourage elk, deer, and bear. Constant burning of undergrowth increased the numbers of
herbivores, the predators that fed on them, and the people who ate them both. Rather than
the thick, unbroken, monumental snarl of trees imagined by Thoreau, the great eastern
forest was an ecological kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens,
and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and oak. The first white settlers in Ohio found
woodlands that resembled English parks—they could drive carriages through the trees.
Fifteen miles from shore in Rhode Island, Giovanni da Verrazzano found trees so widely
spaced that the forest “could be penetrated even by a large army.” John Smith claimed to
have ridden through the Virginia forest at a gallop.
Incredible to imagine today, bison roamed from New York to Georgia. A creature
of the prairie, Bison bison was imported to the East by Native Americans along a path of
indigenous fire, as they changed enough forest into fallows for it to survive far outside its
original range. When the Haudenosaunee hunted these animals, the historian William
Cronon observed, they
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were harvesting a foodstuff which they had consciously been instrumental in
creating. Few English observers could have realized this. People accustomed to keeping
domesticated animals lacked the conceptual tools to recognize that the Indians were
practicing a more distant kind of husbandry of their own.
Indian fire had its greatest impact in the middle of the continent, which Native
Americans transformed into a prodigious game farm. Native Americans burned the Great
Plains and Midwest prairies so much and so often that they increased their extent; in all
probability, a substantial portion of the giant grassland celebrated by cowboys was
established and maintained by the people who arrived there first. “When Lewis and Clark
headed west from [St. Louis],” wrote ethologist Dale Lott, “they were exploring not a
wilderness but a vast pasture managed by and for Native Americans.”
In 1792 the surveyor Peter Fidler examined the plains of southern Alberta
systematically, the first European to do so. Riding with several groups of Indians in high
fire season, he spent days on end in a scorched land. “Grass all burnt this day,” he
reported on November 12. “Not a single pine to be seen three days past.” A day later:
“All burnt ground this Day.” A day later: “The grass nearly burnt all along this Day
except near the Lake.” A month later: “The Grass is now burning [with] very great fury.”
Every fall & spring, & even in the winter when there is no snow, these large
plains either in one place or other is constantly on fire, & when the Grass happens to be
long & the wind high, the sight is grand & awful, & it drives along with amazing
swiftness.
Fidler acknowledged that the fires could be “very dangerous” but understood their
purpose. “These fires burning off the old grass,” he observed, “in the ensuing Spring &
Summer makes excellent fine sweet feed for the Horses & Buffalo, &c.”
When Indian societies disintegrated from disease and mistreatment, forest invaded
savanna in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Texas hill country.
Europeans forgot what the landscape had looked like before and why. Captain John
Palliser, traveling through the same lands as Fidler six decades later, lamented the
Indians’ “disastrous habit of setting the prairie on fire for the most trivial and worse than
useless reasons.” Afterward even the memory of indigenous fire faded. By the twentieth
century biologists were stoutly denying its existence. The “open, park-like woods” seen
by early settlers, Harvard naturalist Hugh Raup asserted in 1937, were not caused by fire;
they “have been, from time immemorial, characteristic of vast areas in North America.”
Raup’s summary description of the idea that they were due to regular, wide-scale Indian
burning? “Inconceivable.” “It is at least a fair assumption,” a widely used college forestry
textbook remarked in 1973, “that no habitual or systematic burning was carried out by
Indians.” In the western United States, the geographer Thomas R. Vale wrote in 2002, the
“modest” Indian population “modified only a tiny fraction of the total landscape for their
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everyday living needs.”
Vale is in the minority now. Spurred in part by historians like Cronon, most
scientists have changed their minds about Indian fire. Using clever laboratory techniques,
they have convinced themselves that in most cases the tribal lore and old chronicles were
right all along: Indian embers were sparkling in the American night for centuries before
the Sumerians climbed their ziggurats.
Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans were living in balance with
Nature—but they had their thumbs on the scale. Shaped for their comfort and
convenience, the American landscape had come to fit their lives like comfortable
clothing. It was a highly successful and stable system, if “stable” is the appropriate word
for a regime that involves routinely enshrouding miles of countryside in smoke and ash.
And it was a system that Indians were abandoning in ever-rising numbers at the time
when Europeans came.
TEN THOUSAND MOUNDS
Anyone who traveled up the Mississippi in 1100 A.D. would have seen it looming
in the distance: a four-level earthen mound bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Around it like echoes were as many as 120 smaller mounds, some topped by tall wooden
palisades, which were in turn ringed by a network of irrigation and transportation canals;
carefully located fields of maize; and hundreds of red-and-white-plastered wood homes
with high-peaked, deeply thatched roofs like those on traditional Japanese farms. Located
near the confluence of the Missouri, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers, the Indian city of
Cahokia was a busy port. Canoes flitted like hummingbirds across its waterfront: traders
bringing copper and mother-of-pearl from faraway places; hunting parties bringing such
rare treats as buffalo and elk; emissaries and soldiers in long vessels bristling with
weaponry; workers ferrying wood from upstream for the ever hungry cookfires; the
ubiquitous fishers with their nets and clubs. Covering five square miles and housing at
least fifteen thousand people, Cahokia was the biggest concentration of people north of
the Río Grande until the eighteenth century.
Away from the riverside, Cahokia was hardly less busy and imposing. Its focal
point was the great mound—Monks Mound, it is now called, named after a group of
Trappists who lived nearby in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Around its sides
rushed a flow of men, their body paint and tattoos obscured by dust from the hardened,
brick-like mud that lay underneath the entire city. Some built new mounds or maintained
the old; others hauled wood for fuel and houses or carried water in leather pouches or
weeded the maize fields with stone hoes. Women carried stacks of woven mats, baskets
of fish and produce, yowling children. Cooksmoke chimneyed to the sky. Standards made
of painted animal skins flapped everywhere. Anyone who has visited Siena or Venice
knows how surprisingly noisy a city without engines can be. At peak times, given the
right wind conditions, Cahokia must have been audible for miles.
Monks Mound opens onto a plaza a thousand feet long. In its southwest corner is
a pair of mounds, one conical, one square. One day I climbed up their grassy sides at
sunset. Hardly any other visitors were there. The humped outline of the vast heap of earth
emerged from the empty green like a powerful prairie ship. The sun was low and the
great mound was casting a shadow that looked long enough to reach the Allegheny
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Mountains. For a moment I saw no sign of contemporary life; St. Louis, just across the
river, had not yet switched on its lights. Around me was the mound city and nothing but
the mound city. To we moderns the sensation of being in a constructed environment is so
ubiquitous as to be invisible—in the cocoon of our strip malls and automobiles, we are
like the fish that cannot feel the water through which they swim. In Cahokia’s day it was
different. A thousand years ago it was the only place for a thousand miles in which one
could be completely enveloped in an artificial landscape.
To visitors today it seems obvious that Cahokia and the many other mound sites
in the Midwest and Southeast are the remains of Indian settlements. It did not seem so
clear in the past. Nineteenth-century writers attributed the mound complexes to, among
others, the Chinese, the Welsh, the Phoenicians, the lost nation of Atlantis, and various
biblical personages. A widely touted theory assigned authorship to Scandinavian émigrés,
who later picked up stakes, moved to Mexico, and became the Toltecs. The
science-fiction writer and archaeology buff Robert Silverberg devoted an entire
entertaining book to the back-and-forth over the origin of the mounds, which
intermittently preoccupied American intellectuals for a century. Thomas Jefferson
removed a slice from a mound on his estate, examined the stratigraphic layers, and
announced that Indians had made it. George Bancroft, one of the founders of American
history, disagreed: the mounds, he wrote in 1840, were purely natural formations.
Charitably, one could say that Bancroft was correct: Cahokia was a product of its
geography, which in turn was a product of the Ice Age. When the glaciers melted, water
gushed south, creating the Mississippi River and the Illinois and Missouri Rivers that
funnel into it. They met in a roil of water eighty miles wide. When the rivers receded,
they exposed a wide strip of bottomland. Into this land a group of Indians coalesced
sometime before 800 A.D.
Nobody knows what these people called themselves or which language they
spoke. They were not “Cahokians”—that name, itself a linguistic garble, comes from an
unrelated group that migrated to the area almost a thousand years later. Archaeologists
are unlikely to find a better name, though. According to William Woods, the geographer
and archaeologist at the University of Kansas, Monks Mound completely covers
whatever habitation these people had before they built Cahokia. To see the remaining
traces of this early settlement, scientists would have to jack up the whole enormous pile
and dig underneath. Almost all that can be known with certainty about this initial group is
that it belonged to a diverse, four-thousand-year-old tradition characterized by the
construction of large earthen mounds.
Based around the Mississippi and its associated rivers, these societies scattered
tens of thousands of mounds from southern Canada and the Great Plains to the Atlantic
coast and the Gulf of Mexico. They were especially concentrated in the Ohio Valley, but
nearly as many are found in the Southeast. Highways, farms, and housing developments
have destroyed most of them, and scientists have investigated only a small fraction of the
survivors. Most of the earthworks were shaped like big cones and stepped pyramids, but
some were sculpted into enormous birds, lizards, bears, long-tailed “alligators,” and, in
Peebles, Ohio, a 1,330-foot-long serpent.
The earliest known examples appeared in northeastern Lousiana about 5,400
years ago, well before the advent of agriculture. For reasons unknown, Indians heaved up
a ring of eleven irregularly sized mounds, most of them connected by a ridge, on a hill
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overlooking the course of the Ouachita River. The biggest was as tall as a two-story
house. About a dozen similar sites are known, of which the Ouachita ring is the oldest
and biggest. None of the mounds in any of these places cover burials or contain artifacts
or show signs of use. Indeed, they seem to have so little purpose that archaeologist Joe
Saunders of Northeast Louisiana University, whose team excavated the Ouachita mounds
in 1997, half-jokingly speculated to Science that the motive for building them could have
been the act of construction itself. “I know it sounds awfully Zen-like,” he conceded.
The Ouachita mounds as they may have appeared at their creation, 5,400 years
ago.
Because modern-day hunter-gatherers in Africa live in egalitarian bands that
constantly move from place to place, archaeologists assumed that Native American
hunter-gatherers must also have done so. Discovering the Louisiana mounds upset this
view: they suggest that at least some early Indians were stay-at-homes. More important,
they testify to levels of public authority and civic organization rarely associated with
nomads. Building a ring of mounds with baskets or deerskins full of dirt is a long-term
enterprise. During construction the workers must eat, which in turn means that other
people must provide their food. Such levels of planning are ordinarily thought to kick in
with the transition to agriculture. When people till and sow the land, anthropologists say,
they set up systems to protect their investment. Eventually somebody ends up in charge
of allocating goods and services. But the mound builders in Louisiana built these massive
constructions at a time when agriculture was barely under way—it was like the whiff in
the air from a faraway ocean. In the central river valleys of North America, people had a
way of life without known analogue.
After these first mounds the record is sparse. After the Ouachita mounds, there is
a gap in the record of more than a millennium. The curtain parts again in about 1500
B.C., when an archipelago of villages, the largest known as Poverty Point, grew up in the
northeast corner of Louisiana. Located fifty-five miles from the Ouachita site, Poverty
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Point had as a focus a structure resembling an amphitheater: six concentric, C-shaped
ridges, each five feet tall, on a bluff facing the river. The jaws of the widest C are 3,950
feet apart, an expanse so big that scientists did not recognize the ridges as constructions
until they took aerial photographs of the site in the 1950s.
Now another gap: seven hundred years. The next major sequence occurs mainly
in the Ohio Valley, hundreds of miles north. Here was a group known as the Adena—the
name is that of a well-known site. Because Adena mounds served as tombs, researchers
know more about their deaths than their lives. Accompanying the noble few in the tombs
to the world of the deceased were copper beads and bracelets, stone tablets and collars,
textiles and awls, and, sometimes, stone pipes in the shape of surreal animals. The head
of the creature faced the user, who sucked in tobacco smoke from its mouth. It is widely
believed that Adena tobacco was much stronger than today’s tobacco—it was
psychoactive.
Tobacco was only one of the crops grown at Adena villages. The Mississippi and
Ohio Valleys and much of the U.S. Southeast were home to what is known as the Eastern
Agricultural Complex. A full-fledged agricultural revolution with a multifarious suite of
crops, the complex is an example of a major cultural innovation that has completely
disappeared. Its crops were such unfamiliar plants as marshelder, knotweed, maygrass,
and little barley. All of these species still exist; one could stock a specialty restaurant with
them. (Sample menu: maygrass patties, steamed knotweed beans, and buffalo tongue.)
No one seems to be doing that, though. In fact, farmers today treat several of these crops
as weeds—they routinely blast little barley with herbicides. Archaeologists have tentative
indications of early domestication in spots from Illinois to Alabama by 1000 B.C. But
agriculture did not begin to flower, so to speak, until the Adena.
Adena influence in customs and artifacts can be spotted in archaeological sites
from Indiana to Kentucky and all the way north to Vermont and even New Brunswick.
For a long time researchers believed this indicated that the Adena had conquered other
groups throughout this area, but many now believe that the influence was cultural: like
European teenagers donning baggy pants and listening to hip-hop, Adena’s neighbors
adopted its customs. Archaeologists sometimes call the area in which such cultural flows
occur an “interaction sphere.” Both less and more than a nation, an interaction sphere is a
region in which one society disseminates its symbols, values, and inventions to others; an
example is medieval Europe, much of which fell under the sway of Gothic aesthetics and
ideas. The Adena interaction sphere lasted from about 800 B.C. to about 100 B.C.
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MOUNDBUILDERS, 3400 B.C.–1400 A.D.
Textbooks sometimes say that the Adena were succeeded by the Hopewell, but
the relation is unclear; the Hopewell may simply have been a later stage of the same
culture. The Hopewell, too, built mounds, and like the Adena seem to have spoken an
Algonquian language. (“Hopewell” refers to the farmer on whose property an early site
was discovered.) Based in southern Ohio, the Hopewell interaction sphere lasted until
about 400 A.D. and extended across two-thirds of what is now the United States. Into the
Midwest came seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, silver from Ontario, fossil shark’s
teeth from Chesapeake Bay, and obsidian from Yellowstone. In return the Hopewell
exported ideas: the bow and arrow, monumental earthworks, fired pottery (Adena pots
were not put into kilns), and, probably most important, the Hopewell religion.
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The Hopewell apparently sought spiritual ecstasy by putting themselves into
trances, perhaps aided by tobacco. In this enraptured state, the soul journeys to other
worlds. As is usually the case, people with special abilities emerged to assist travelers
through the portal to the numinous. Over time these shamans became gatekeepers,
controlling access to the supernatural realm. They passed on their control and privileges
to their children, creating a hereditary priesthood: counselors to kings, if not kings
themselves. They acquired healing lore, mastered and invented ceremonies, learned the
numerous divinities in the Hopewell pantheon. We know little of these gods today,
because few of their images have endured to the present. Presumably shamans recounted
their stories to attentive crowds; almost certainly, they explained when and where the
gods wanted to build mounds.
In the context of the village, the mound, visible everywhere, was as much a
beacon as a medieval cathedral. As with Gothic churches, which had plazas for the
outdoor performance of sacred mystery plays, the mounds had greens before them: ritual
spaces for public use. Details of the performances are lost, but there is every indication
that they were exuberant affairs. “There is a stunning vigor about the Ohio Hopewell…,”
Silverberg wrote,
a flamboyance and fondness for excess that manifests itself not only in the
intricate geometrical enclosures and the massive mounds, but in these gaudy displays of
conspicuous consumption [in the tombs]. To envelop a corpse from head to feet in pearls,
to weigh it down in many pounds of copper, to surround it with masterpieces of sculpture
and pottery, and then to bury everything under tons of earth—this betokens a kind of
cultural energy that numbs and awes those who follow after.
Vibrant and elaborate, perhaps a little vulgar in its passion for display, Hopewell
religion spread through most of the eastern United States in the first four centuries A.D.
As with the expansion of Christianity, the new converts are unlikely to have understood
the religion in the same way as its founders. Nonetheless, its impact was profound. In a
mutated form, it may well have given impetus to the rise of Cahokia.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN BOTTOM
Cahokia was one big piece in the mosaic of chiefdoms that covered the lower half
of the Mississippi and the Southeast at the end of the first millennium A.D. Known
collectively as “Mississippian” cultures, these societies arose several centuries after the
decline of the Hopewell culture, and probably were its distant descendants. At any one
time a few larger polities dominated the dozens or scores of small chiefdoms. Cahokia,
biggest of all, was preeminent from about 950 to about 1250 A.D. It was an anomaly: the
greatest city north of the Río Grande, it was also the only city north of the Río Grande.
Five times or more bigger than any other Mississippian chiefdom, Cahokia’s population
of at least fifteen thousand made it comparable in size to London, but on a landmass
without Paris, Córdoba, or Rome.
I call Cahokia a city so as to have a stick to beat it with, but it was not a city in
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any modern sense. A city provides goods and services for its surrounding area,
exchanging food from the countryside for the products of its sophisticated craftspeople.
By definition, its inhabitants are urban—they aren’t farmers. Cahokia, however, was a
huge collection of farmers packed cheek by jowl. It had few specialized craftworkers and
no middle-class merchants. On reflection, Cahokia’s dissimilarity to other cities is not
surprising; having never seen a city, its citizens had to invent every aspect of urban life
for themselves.
Despite the nineteenth-century fascination with the mounds, archaeologists did
not begin to examine Cahokia thoroughly until the 1960s. Since then studies have gushed
from the presses. By and large, they have only confirmed Cahokia’s status as a statistical
outlier. Cahokia sat on the eastern side of the American Bottom. Most of the area has
clayey soil that is hard to till and prone to floods. Cahokia was located next to the largest
stretch of good farmland in the entire American Bottom. At its far edge, a forest of oak
and hickory topped a line of bluffs. The area was little settled until as late as 600 A.D.,
when people trickled in and formed small villages, groups of a few hundred who planted
gardens and boated up and down the Mississippi to other villages. As the millennium
approached, the American Bottom had a resident population of several thousand. Then,
without much apparent warning, there was, according to the archaeologist Timothy R.
Pauketat of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, what has been called a “Big
Bang”—a few decades of tumultuous change.
Cahokia’s mounds emerged from the Big Bang, along with the East St. Louis
mound complex a mile away (the second biggest, after Cahokia, though now mostly
destroyed) and the St. Louis mounds just across the Mississippi (the fourth biggest).
Monks Mound was the first and most grandiose of the construction projects. Its core is a
slab of clay about 900 feet long, 650 feet wide, and more than 20 feet tall. From an
engineering standpoint, clay should never be selected as the bearing material for a big
earthen monument. Clay readily absorbs water, expanding as it does. The American
Bottom clay, known as smectite clay, is especially prone to swelling: its volume can
increase by a factor of eight. Drying, it shrinks back to its original dimensions. Over time
the heaving will destroy whatever is built on top of it. The Cahokians’ solution to this
problem was discovered mainly by Woods, the University of Kansas archaeologist and
geographer, who has spent two decades excavating Monks Mound.
To minimize instability, he told me, the Cahokians kept the slab at a constant
moisture level: wet but not too wet. Moistening the clay was easy—capillary action will
draw up water from the floodplain, which has a high water table. The trick is to stop
evaporation from drying out the top. In an impressive display of engineering savvy, the
Cahokians encapsulated the slab, sealing it off from the air by wrapping it in thin,
alternating layers of sand and clay. The sand acts as a shield for the slab. Water rises
through the clay to meet it, but cannot proceed further because the sand is too loose for
further capillary action. Nor can the water evaporate; the clay layers atop the sand press
down and prevent air from coming in. In addition, the sand lets rainfall drain away from
the mound, preventing it from swelling too much. The final result covered almost fifteen
acres and was the largest earthen structure in the Western Hemisphere; though built out
of unsuitable material in a floodplain, it has stood for a thousand years.
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Reconstructions of Cahokia, the greatest city north of the Río Grande, ca. 1250
A.D.
Because the slab had to stay moist, it must have been built and covered quickly, a
task requiring a big workforce. Evidence suggests that people moved from miles around
to the American Bottom to be part of the project. If the ideas of Pauketat, the University
of Illinois archaeologist, are correct, the immigrants probably came to regret their
decision to move. To his way of thinking, the Big Bang occurred after a single ambitious
person seized power, perhaps in a coup. Although his reign may have begun
idealistically, Cahokia quickly became an autocracy; in an Ozymandiac extension of his
ego, the supreme leader set in motion the construction projects. Loyalists forced
immigrants to join the labor squads, maintaining control with the occasional massacre.
Burials show the growing power of the elite: in a small mound half a mile south of
Monks Mound, archaeologists in the late 1960s uncovered six high-status people interred
with shell beads, copper ornaments, mica artworks—and the sacrificed bodies of more
than a hundred retainers. Among them were fifty young women who had been buried
alive.
Woods disagrees with what he calls the “proto-Stalinist work camp” scenario.
Nobody was forced to erect Monks Mound, he says. Despite the intermittent displays of
coercion, he says, Cahokians put it up “because they wanted to.” They “were proud to be
part of these symbols of community identity.” Monks Mound and its fellows were, in
part, a shout-out to the world—Look at us! We’re doing something different! It was also
the construction of a landscape of sacred power, built in an atmosphere of ecstatic
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eligious celebration. The American Bottom, in this scenario, was the site of one of the
world’s most spectacular tent revivals. Equally important, Woods says, the mound city
was in large part an outgrowth of the community’s previous adoption of maize.
Before Cahokia’s rise, people were slowly hunting the local deer and bison
populations to extinction. The crops in the Eastern Agricultural Complex could not
readily make up the difference. Among other problems, most had small seeds—imagine
trying to feed a family on sesame seeds, and you have some idea of what it would have
been like to subsist on maygrass. Maize had been available since the first century B.C. (It
would have arrived sooner, but Indians had to breed landraces that could tolerate the
cooler weather, shorter growing seasons, and longer summer days of the north.) The
Hopewell, however, almost ignored it. Somewhere around 800 A.D. their hungry
successors took another look at the crop and liked what they saw. The American Bottom,
with its plenitude of easily cleared, maize-suitable land, was one of the best places to
grow it for a considerable distance. The newcomers needed to store their harvests for the
winter, a task most efficiently accomplished with a communal granary. The granary
needed to be supervised—an invitation to develop centralized power. Growth happened
fast and may well have been hurried along by a charismatic leader, Woods said, but
something like Cahokia probably would have happened anyway.
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THE AMERICAN BOTTOM, 1300 A.D.
Maize also played a role in the city’s disintegration. Cahokia represented the first
time Indians north of the Río Grande had tried to feed and shelter fifteen thousand people
in one place, and they made beginner’s mistakes. To obtain fuel and construction material
and to grow food, they cleared trees and vegetation from the bluffs to the east and planted
every inch of arable land. Because the city’s numbers kept increasing, the forest could not
return. Instead people kept moving further out to get timber, which then had to be carried
considerable distances. Having no beasts of burden, the Cahokians themselves had to do
all the carrying. Meanwhile, Woods told me, the city began outstripping its water supply,
a “somewhat wimpy” tributary called Canteen Creek. To solve both of these problems at
once, the Cahokians apparently changed its course, which had consequences that they
cannot have anticipated.
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Nowadays Cahokia Creek, which flows from the north, and Canteen Creek, which
flows from the east, join together at a point about a quarter mile northeast of Monks
Mound. On its way to the Mississippi, the combined river then wanders, quite
conveniently, within two hundred yards of the central plaza. Originally, though, the
smaller Canteen Creek alone occupied that channel. Cahokia Creek drained into a lake to
the northwest, then went straight to the Mississippi, bypassing Cahokia altogether.
Sometime between 1100 and 1200 A.D., according to Woods’s as-yet unpublished
research, Cahokia Creek split in two. One fork continued as before, but the second, larger
fork dumped into Canteen Creek. The combined river provided much more water to the
city—it was about seventy feet wide. And it also let woodcutters upstream send logs
almost to Monks Mound. A natural inference, to Woods’s way of thinking, is that the
city, in a major public works project, “intentionally diverted” Cahokia Creek.
In summer, heavy rains lash the Mississippi Valley. With the tree cover stripped
from the uplands, rainfall would have sluiced faster and heavier into the creeks,
increasing the chance of floods and mudslides. Because the now-combined Cahokia and
Canteen Creeks carried much more water than had Canteen Creek alone, washouts would
have spread more widely across the American Bottom than would have been the case if
the rivers had been left alone. Beginning in about 1200 A.D., according to Woods,
Cahokia’s maize fields repeatedly flooded, destroying the harvests.
The city’s problems were not unique. Cahokia’s rise coincided with the spread of
maize throughout the eastern half of the United States. The Indians who adopted it were
setting aside millennia of tradition in favor of a new technology. In the past, they had
shaped the landscape mainly with fire; the ax came out only for garden plots of
marshelder and little barley. As maize swept in, Indians burned and cleared thousands of
acres of land, mainly in river valleys. As in Cahokia, floods and mudslides rewarded
them. (How do archaeologists know this? They know it from sudden increases in river
sedimentation coupled with the near disappearance of pollen from bottomland trees in
those sediments.) Between about 1100 and 1300 A.D., cataclysms afflicted Indian
settlements from the Hudson Valley to Florida.
Apparently the majority learned from mistakes; after this time, archaeologists
don’t see this kind of widespread erosion, though they do see lots and lots of maize. A
traveler in 1669 reported that six square miles of maize typically encircled
Haudenosaunee villages. This estimate was very roughly corroborated two decades later
by the Marquis de Denonville, governor of New France, who destroyed the annual
harvest of four adjacent Haudenosaunee villages to deter future attacks. Denonville
reported that he had burned 1.2 million bushels of maize—42,000 tons. Today, as I
mentioned in Chapter 6, Oaxacan farmers typically plant roughly 1.25–2.5 acres to
harvest a ton of landrace maize. If that relation held true in upstate New York—a big, but
not ridiculous assumption—arithmetic suggests that the four villages, closely packed
together, were surrounded by between eight and sixteen square miles of maize fields.
Between these fields was the forest, which Indians were subjecting to parallel
changes. Sometime in the first millennium A.D., the Indians who had burned
undergrowth to facilitate grazing began systematically replanting large belts of woodland,
transforming them into orchards for fruit and mast (the general name for hickory nuts,
beechnuts, acorns, butternuts, hazelnuts, pecans, walnuts, and chestnuts). Chestnut was
especially popular—not the imported European chestnut roasted on Manhattan street
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corners in the fall, but the smaller, soft-shelled, deeply sweet native American chestnut,
now almost extinguished by chestnut blight. In colonial times, as many as one out of
every four trees in between southeastern Canada and Georgia was a chestnut—partly the
result, it would seem, of Indian burning and planting.
Hickory was another favorite. Rambling through the Southeast in the 1770s, the
naturalist William Bartram observed Creek families storing a hundred bushels of hickory
nuts at a time. “They pound them to pieces, and then cast them into boiling water, which,
after passing through fine strainers, preserves the most oily part of the liquid” to make a
thick milk, “as sweet and rich as fresh cream, an ingredient in most of their cookery,
especially hominy and corncakes.” Years ago a friend and I were served hickory milk in
rural Georgia by an eccentric backwoods artist named St. EOM who claimed Creek
descent. Despite the unsanitary presentation, the milk was ambrosial—fragrantly nutty,
delightfully heavy on the tongue, unlike anything I had encountered before.
Within a few centuries, the Indians of the eastern forest reconfigured much of
their landscape from a patchwork game park to a mix of farmland and orchards. Enough
forest was left to allow for hunting, but agriculture was an increasing presence. The result
was a new “balance of nature.”
From today’s perspective, the success of the transition is striking. It was so
sweeping and ubiquitous that early European visitors marveled at the number of nut and
fruit trees and the big clearings with only a dim apprehension that the two might be due
to the same human source. One reason that Bartram failed to understand the artificiality
of what he saw was that the surgery was almost without scars; the new landscape
functioned smoothly, with few of the overreaches that plagued English land management.
Few of the overreaches, but not none: Cahokia was a glaring exception.
A friend and I visited Cahokia in 2002. Woods, who lived nearby, kindly agreed
to show us around. The site is now a state park with a small museum. From Monks
Mound we walked halfway across the southern plaza and then stopped to look back.
From the plaza, Woods pointed out, the priests at the summit could not be seen. “There
was smoke and noise and sacred activity constantly going on up there, but the peasants
didn’t know what they were doing.” Nonetheless, average Cahokians understood the
intent: to assure the city’s continued support by celestial forces. “And that justification
fell apart with the floods,” Woods said.
There is little indication that the Cahokia floods killed anyone, or even led to
widespread hunger. Nonetheless, the string of woes provoked a crisis of legitimacy.
Unable to muster the commanding vitality of their predecessors, the priestly leadership
responded ineffectively, even counterproductively. Even as the flooding increased, it
directed the construction of a massive, two-mile-long palisade around the central
monuments, complete with bastions, shielded entryways, and (maybe) a catwalk up top.
The wall was built in such a brain-frenzied hurry that it cut right through some
commoners’ houses.
Cahokia being the biggest city around, it seems unlikely that the palisade was
needed to deter enemy attack (in the event, none materialized). Instead it was probably
created to separate elite from hoi polloi, with the goal of emphasizing the priestly rulers’
separate, superior, socially critical connection to the divine. At the same time the palisade
was also intended to welcome the citizenry—anyone could freely pass through its dozen
or so wide gates. Constructed at enormous cost, this porous architectural folly consumed
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twenty thousand trees.
More consequential, the elite revamped Monks Mound. By extending a low
platform from one side, they created a stage for priests to perform ceremonies in full view
of the public. According to Woods’s acoustic simulations, every word should have been
audible below, lifting the veil of secrecy. It was the Cahokian equivalent of the
Reformation, except that the Church imposed it on itself. At the same time, the nobles
hedged their bets. Cahokia’s rulers tried to bolster their position by building even bigger
houses and flaunting even more luxury goods like fancy pottery and jewelry made from
exotic semiprecious stones.
It did no good. A catastrophic earthquake razed Cahokia in the beginning of the
thirteenth century, knocking down the entire western side of Monks Mound. In 1811 and
1812 the largest earthquakes in U.S. history abruptly lifted or lowered much of the central
Mississippi Valley by as much as twelve feet. The Cahokia earthquake, caused by the
same fault, was of similar magnitude. It must have splintered many of the city’s
wood-and-plaster buildings; fallen torches and scattered cooking fires would have ignited
the debris, burning down most surviving structures. Water from the rivers, shaken by the
quake, would have sloshed onto the land in a mini-tsunami.
Already reeling from the floods, Cahokia never recovered from the earthquake. Its
rulers rebuilt Monks Mound, but the poorly engineered patch promptly sagged.
Meanwhile the social unrest turned violent; many houses went up in flames. “There was a
civil war,” Woods said. “Fighting in the streets. The whole polity turned in on itself and
tore itself apart.”
For all their energy, Cahokia’s rulers made a terrible mistake: they did not attempt
to fix the problem directly. True, the task would not have been easy. Trees cannot be
replaced with a snap of the fingers. Nor could Cahokia Creek readily be reinstalled in its
original location. “Once the water starts flowing in the new channel,” Woods said, “it is
almost impossible to put it back in the old as the new channel rapidly downcuts and
establishes itself.”
Given Cahokia’s engineering expertise, though, solutions were within reach:
terracing hillsides, diking rivers, even moving Cahokia. Like all too many dictators,
Cahokia’s rulers focused on maintaining their hold over the people, paying little attention
to external reality. By 1350 A.D. the city was almost empty. Never again would such a
large Indian community exist north of Mexico.
HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR
In the early 1980s I visited Chetumal, a coastal city on the Mexico-Belize border.
A magazine had asked me to cover the intellectual ferment caused by the decipherment of
Maya hieroglyphics. In researching the article, the photographer Peter Menzel and I
became intrigued by the then little-known site of Calakmul, whose existence had been
first reported five decades before. Although it was the biggest of all Maya ruins, it had
never felt an archaeologist’s trowel. Its temples and villas, enveloped in thick tropical
forest, were as close to a lost city as we would ever be likely to see. Before visiting
Calakmul, though, Peter wanted to photograph it from the air. Chetumal had the nearest
airport, which was why we went there.
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ABOVE: As late as the 1980s, the Maya city of Kaan (now Calakmul) was
encased in vegetation (top). Excavations have now revealed the pyramids beneath the
trees (the right-hand mound in the top photo is the pyramid at bottom), exemplifying the
recent explosion of knowledge about the Maya.
The town was unpromising in those days. We arrived late in the night, and the
only restaurant we could find served a single platter: octopus with pureed beef liver. I am,
as a rule, a member of the Clean Plate Club. Looking at the rubbery white octopus chunks
bobbing in the tarry mass of liver, I rejected an entire meal for the first time since
childhood. Soon afterward the electricity went out everywhere in town. For that reason
we did not discover until we retired that our hotel beds were full of little hungry
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creatures. I was peevish the next morning when we met our pilot.
At first we flew over Highway 186, which arrows west from Chetumal across the
Maya heartland. Every so often the pilot tapped my shoulder and pointed to an
anonymous, tree-covered hummock. “Ruinas,” he said. Otherwise there was little to
report. After a while we turned south, toward the border with Guatemala. The Yucatán
Peninsula grows wetter as one heads south. The vegetation beneath the plane quickly
became thicker, lusher, higher, more aggressive.
All at once we came upon Calakmul. The city proper, built on a low ridge, had
once housed as many as fifty thousand people and sprawled across an area as big as
twenty-five square miles. (The city-state’s total population may have been 575,000.) The
downtown area alone had six thousand masonry structures: homes, temples, palaces, and
granaries, even an eighteen-foot-high defensive wall. Scattered through the
neighborhoods was a network of reservoirs, many apparently stocked with fish.
Thousands of acres of farmland extended beyond. Little of this was known then—I am
quoting from later reports—and none of it was visible from the plane. From our vantage
the only visual testament to Calakmul’s past majesty was its two great central pyramids,
each wrapped to the shoulders in vegetation.
Peter asked the pilot to fly low circles around the pyramids while he put together
the perfect match of light, lens, angle, and shutter speed. He swapped lenses and cameras
and window views in a dozen different combinations. At a certain point, he asked,
peering through the shutter, “¿Cuánta gasolina tenemos?” How much gas do we have?
The pilot squinted at the fuel gauge: three-quarters full. A puzzled look spread
over his face. I leaned over to watch as he tapped the gauge’s foggy plastic cover with his
forefinger. The needle plunged almost to empty—it had been pinned.
Peter put down his cameras.
Eventually the blood returned to our heads, permitting cerebration. We had to
decide whether to take the shortest path to the airport, straight across the forest, or turn to
the north and then fly east along Highway 186, which we could try to land on if we ran
out of gas. The trade-off was that the highway route was so much longer that choosing it
would greatly increase our chances of a forced touchdown. Soon we realized the decision
boiled down to one question: How scary was the prospect of landing in the forest?
I recall looking down at the trees. They had engulfed the great buildings and were
slowly ripping apart the soft limestone with their roots. Circling above the city, I had
thought, Nobody will ever find out anything about this place. The forest is too
overpowering. Calakmul’s inhabitants had cut a little divot into its flanks for their city,
but now the vegetation, massive and indifferent, was smothering every trace of their
existence. From the plane the trees seemed to march to the horizon without interruption.
We flew over the highway. I tried not to stare at the fuel gauge. Still, I couldn’t
help noticing as, one after another, warning lights blinked on. The plane had so little gas
that the engine quit a moment after our wheels hit the tarmac. When we rolled silently to
a stop, the pilot leapt out and kissed the ground. I sat back and regarded Chetumal with
new affection.
In the mid-1990s the Mexican government paved a road to the site, which is now
the center of the 1.7-million-acre Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. Aerial views of the ruins
are now spectacular; archaeologists have cleared most of the central city. Along the way,
contrary to my initial impression, they have managed to learn a great deal about
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Calakmul, the landscape it occupied, and the collapse that led to the forest’s return. To
begin with, they deciphered Calakmul’s proper name: Kaan, the Kingdom of the Snake.
Impressively, they learned it from the best possible source, the ancient Maya themselves.
Maya scribes wrote in codices made of folded fig-bark paper or deerskin.
Unfortunately for posterity, the Spaniards destroyed all but four of these books. The rest
of what remains are texts on monuments, murals, and pottery—about fifteen thousand
samples of writing, according to one estimate. Piecing together events from these sources
is like trying to understand the U.S. Civil War from the plaques on park statues: possible,
but tricky. Combining literal interpretation with an understanding of context, epigraphers
(decipherers of ancient writing) have spent the last thirty years hauling submerged chunks
of Maya history to the surface. David Stuart, a Mayanist at Harvard, decocted the
encounter between Chak Tok Ich’aak and the Teotihuacan expedition in 2000. And
Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube, respectively of University College London and the
University of Bonn, first put the history of the great Mutal-Kaan war together in 1996.
Most of the stelae at Kaan were made from soft stone that has eroded too much to
be readable. Martin and Grube thus had to rely on inscriptions at other sites that mention
Kaan and its rulers. These are surprisingly numerous. Too numerous, in a way:
archaeologists have turned up at least eleven versions of Kaan’s early dynastic history
painted on big vases. Exasperatingly, none of the eleven tells exactly the same story. The
chronological list of rulers differs on different lists, some lists do not include known
kings, and some include kings who probably were mythological—as if a tally of English
rulers matter-of-factly included King Arthur and his father, Uther Pen-dragon. The dates
are inconsistent, too. Kaan’s origins may reach back as far as 400 B.C. But the city-state
does not unambiguously enter the historical record until about 500 A.D., when it had a
king named Yuknoom Ch’een. The city was already dominating its neighbors; in 546,
Yuknoom Ch’een’s apparent successor supervised the coronation of a five-year-old
monarch in nearby Naranjo.
This supervision, recorded on a stela erected seventy years afterward, is the first
known example in Yucatán of a Mesoamerican specialty: the chaperoned coronation. For
much of the last century most Mayanists believed that at its height—200 to 900 A.D.,
roughly speaking—the Maya realm was divided into a hugger-mugger of more or less
equivalent city-states. Critics pointed out that this theory failed to account for an
inconvenient fact: Kaan, Mutal, and a few other cities were much bigger and more
imposing than their neighbors, and therefore, one would usually assume, more powerful.
According to the skeptics, Maya society was divided into a small number of blocs, each
controlled by a dominant city, each striving to achieve some semblance of empire.
Compelling evidence for this view did not emerge until the mid-1980s, when
several epigraphers figured out that the Maya glyph ahaw, which means “sovereign” or
“lord,” had a possessive form, y-ahaw, “his lord,” meaning a lord who “belongs” to
another lord: that is, a vassal king. Another glyph, u-kahi, turned out to mean “by the
action of.” They were only two words, but enough to make dozens of texts speak. In the
stela, the five-year-old ahaw in Naranjo was crowned “by the action of” the ahaw of
Kaan. Naranjo’s young king “belonged” to Kaan. (Naranjo is the name scientists gave to
the city; its original name may have been Saal.)
“The political landscape of the Classic Maya resembles many in the Old
World—Classical Greece or Renaissance Italy are worthy comparisons—where a
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sophisticated and widely shared culture flourished among perpetual division and
conflict,” Martin and Grube wrote in Chronicles of the Maya Kings and Queens (2000),
their remarkable summary of the epigraphic discoveries of the last three decades. It was a
“world criss-crossed by numerous patron-client relationships and family ties, in which
major centers vied with one another in enmities that could endure for centuries.” As
Martin put it to me, Maya civilization indeed bore striking similarities to that of ancient
Greece. The Greeks were divided into numerous fractious communities, some of which
were able to dominate others by threats of force, unequal alliance, or commerce. And just
as the conflicted relationship among Athens and Sparta was a leitmotif of Greek life, so
Maya society resounded for centuries with the echoes of the struggle between Mutal and
Kaan.
Sometime before 561 A.D., a ruler known only as “Sky Witness” took the throne
of Kaan. A major figure despite his obscurity, Sky Witness set out to destroy Mutal. The
motive for his hatred is uncertain, though it may have been rooted in the invasion from
Teotihuacan. The new rulers of Mutal had aggressively thrown their weight around and
by Sky Witness’s time controlled as much as eight thousand square miles. (Mutal city
itself had an estimated population of sixty thousand, plus many more in its hinterland.)
Particularly important, the Teotihuacan-backed dynasty took over several outposts on the
Usumacinta River system, Yucatán’s most important trade route. Shipments of luxury
goods from faraway regions usually had to travel up or down the Usumacinta; Mutal’s
ability to tax and supervise the trade must have been terribly vexing, even if it had little
practical import. Sky Witness may have thought that Mutal was becoming a dangerous
neighbor and decided to take preemptive action. Or he may have wanted to control the
Usumacinta and its tributaries himself. A dynastic dispute may have been involved.
Grube told me that he thought the kings of Kaan, never allied with Teotihuacan, may
have wanted to stamp out pernicious foreign influences—xenophobia is a powerful
motive in every culture. No matter what the motive, Sky Witness’s plan to dismantle
Mutal was brilliant—in the short run, anyway. In the long run, it helped set in motion the
Maya collapse.
Kaan and Mutal had a lot at stake. The Yucatán Peninsula is like a gigantic
limestone wharf projecting into the Caribbean. Roughly speaking, the
northwest-southeast line on which it joins the mainland runs through the middle of the
Maya heartland. Despite receiving three to five feet of precipitation in an average year,
this area is prone to drought. Almost all the rain falls during the May-to-December rainy
season and rapidly sinks hundreds of feet into the porous limestone, from where it cannot
easily be extracted. Little is available during the five hot, dry months between January
and April. The region does have permanently water-filled swamps, sinkholes, and lakes,
but often these are too salty to drink or use for irrigation. So toxic is the groundwater, a
U.S.-Mexican research team remarked in 2002, that the Maya realm was “geochemically
hostile” to urban colonization. Its occupation “more resembled settlement on the moon or
Antarctica than most other terrestrial habitats.”
Most of the salt occurred in the sediments on the swamp bottoms. To make the
water potable, the Maya laid a layer of crushed limestone atop the sediments, effectively
paving over the salt. As the researchers noted, the work had to be done before the Maya
could move in and set up their milpas and gardens. “Permanent, year-round populations
could be established only in the presence of an anticipatory engineering of water
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supplies.” The Maya heartland, in other words, was a network of artificially habitable
terrestrial islands.
As Maya numbers grew, so did the islands beneath them. North of Kaan, half a
dozen small cities improved agricultural conditions by lifting up entire fields and carving
out rain-retaining terraces on dry hillsides. Kaan itself dug out a series of reservoirs,
established neighborhoods around each one, and linked the ensemble with roads and
waterways. Central Mutal was ringed by a chain of seven reservoirs, with another central
reservoir reserved for royalty. And so on.
Revamping the landscape both allowed Maya cities to expand and made them
more vulnerable. Despite constant maintenance, erosion silted up reservoirs, hurricanes
destroyed terraces, and weeds and sediment choked irrigation networks. Over time the
Maya found themselves simultaneously maintaining existing systems and pushing out to
cover past mistakes. If war damage made it impossible for a city’s inhabitants to keep up,
they would be in trouble; island dwellers who wreck their homes have no place to move.
One can speculate that the losers’ fear of having their backs to the wall generated the
extraordinary tenacity of the Kaan-Mutal conflict.
Sky Witness’s strategy was to ring Mutal with a chain of client states and allies
and then strangle it, boa constrictor–style. In this way Kaan would both acquire a
dominant position in the Maya realm and destroy its enemy. The first step was to suborn
Mutal’s most important vassal, the king of Oxwitza’ (now known as Caracol). With
115,000 people, Oxwitza’ was twice as populous as Mutal and controlled almost as much
territory. Yet it had become Mutal’s vassal soon after Teotihuacan installed the new
dynasty. No concrete evidence exists that the first event caused the second, but the
coincidence in timing is hard to dismiss. Sky Witness seems to have divined or inspired
resentment in Oxwitza’. The king of Oxwitza’ took the throne “by the action of” Mutal in
553 A.D. Within three years Sky Witness had persuaded the new ruler of Oxwitza’ to
betray his masters.
Maya polities were not large enough to maintain standing armies; instead both
Kaan and Oxwitza’ mustered short-term militiamen to fight wars. Wearing cotton armor
and wooden helmets, brandishing lances, hatchets, and maces, and carrying great painted
litters with effigies of their gods, the two militias marched on Mutal. Kaan is some sixty
miles north of Mutal; Oxwitza’ is fifty miles south of it. The two cities planned to crush
Mutal between them. They carefully chose the day of the attack. Maya priests tracked the
movements of Venus, which they regarded as a powerful portent. Its day of emergence in
the morning sky was considered an occasion on which warfare and violence was likely to
be rewarded—an optimal day to attack a city. On April 29, 562, in what archaeologists
call a Star Wars assault, the two celestially guided armies overran Mutal, sacked its
precincts, and probably killed its king (the relevant glyphs are too worn to read).
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THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR
Kaan and Mutal Battle to Control the Maya Heartland, 526–682 A.D.
The war between Kaan and Mutal lasted more than a century and consumed much
of the Maya heartland. Kaan’s strategy was to surround Mutal and its subordinate
city-states with a ring of enemies. By conquest, negotiation, and marriage alliance, Kaan
succeeded in encircling its enemy—but not in winning the war.
Kaan did not directly occupy Mutal; victorious Maya cities rarely had the
manpower to rule their rivals directly. Instead, in the by-now familiar hegemonic pattern,
they tried to force the rulers of the vanquished state to become their vassals. If an enemy
sovereign was slain, as apparently happened in Mutal, the conquerors often didn’t
emplace a new one; kings were divine, and thus by definition irreplaceable. Instead the
victorious force simply quit the scene, hoping that any remaining problems would
disappear in the ensuing chaos. This strategy was partly successful in Mutal—not a single
dated monument was erected in the city for a century. Because the city’s postattack rulers
had (at best) distant connections to the slain legitimate king, they struggled for decades to
get on their feet. Unhappily for Kaan, they eventually did it.
The agent for Mutal’s return was its king, Nuun Ujol Chaak. Taking the helm of
the city in 620 A.D., he was as determined to reestablish his city’s former glory as Kaan’s
rulers were to prevent it. He suborned Kaan’s eastern neighbor, Naranjo, which attacked
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Mutal’s former ally, Oxwitza’. The ensuing conflict spiraled out to involve the entire
center of the Maya realm. Decades of conflict, including a long civil war in Mutal, led to
the formation of two large blocs, one dominated by Mutal, the other by Kaan. As cities
within the blocs traded attacks with each other, half a dozen cities ended up in ruins,
including Naranjo, Oxwitza’, Mutal, and Kaan. The story was not revealed in full until
2001, when a storm uprooted a tree in the ruin of Dos Pilas, a Mutal outpost. In the hole
from its root ball archaeologists discovered a set of steps carved with the biography of
B’alaj Chan K’awiil, a younger brother or half brother to Mutal’s dynasty-restoring king,
Nuun Ujol Chaak. As deciphered by the epigrapher Stanley Guenter, the staircase and
associated monuments reveal the turbulent life of a great scalawag who spent his life
alternately running from the armies of Kaan and Mutal and trying to set them against
each other.
Eventually an army under Nuun Ujol Chaak met the forces of Kaan on April 30,
679. Maya battles rarely involved massive direct engagements. This was an exception. In
an unusual excursion into the high-flown, the inscriptions on the stairway apostrophized
the gore: “the blood was pooled and the skulls of the Mutal people were piled into
mountains.” B’alaj Chan K’awiil was carried into battle in the guise of the god Ik’ Sip, a
deity with a black-painted face. In this way he acquired its supernatural power. The
technique worked, according to the stairway: “B’alaj Chan K’awiil brought down the
spears and shields of Nuun Ujol Chaak.” Having killed his brother, the vindicated B’alaj
Chan K’awiil took the throne of Mutal.
In a celebration, B’alaj Chan K’awiil joined the rulers of Kaan in a joyous
ceremonial dance on May 10, 682. But even as he danced with his master, a
counterrevolutionary coup in Mutal placed Nuun Ujol Chaak’s son onto the throne, from
where he quickly became a problem. On August 5, 695, Kaan soldiers once again went
into battle against Mutal. Bright with banners, obsidian blades gleaming in the sun, the
army advanced on the long-term enemy it had routed so many times before—and was
utterly defeated. In a psychological blow, Mutal captured the effigy of a Kaan patron
deity—an enormous supernatural jaguar—that its army carried into battle. A month later,
in a mocking ceremonial pageant, the king of Mutal paraded around with the effigy
strapped to the back of his palanquin.
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Maya “books” consisted of painted bark folded accordion-style into sheaves
known as codexes. Time and the Spanish destroyed all but four codexes, and even those
are fragmentary (above, a detail from the Paris codex, somewhat reconstructed; right, a
piece of the Grolier codex).
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Kaan’s loss marks the onset of the Maya collapse. Kaan never recovered from its
defeat; Mutal lasted another century before it, too, sank into oblivion. Between 800 and
830 A.D., most of the main dynasties fell; cities winked out throughout the Maya
heartland. Mutal’s last carved inscription dates to 869; soon after, its great public spaces
were filled with squatters. In the next hundred years, the population of most southern
areas declined by at least three-quarters.
The disaster was as much cultural as demographic; the Maya continued to exist by
the million, but their central cities did not. Morley, the Harvard archaeologist,
documented the cultural disintegration when he discovered that Maya inscriptions with
Long Count dates rise steadily in number from the first known example, at Mutal in 292
A.D.; peak in about 790; and cease altogether in 909. The decline tracks the Maya
priesthood’s steady loss of the scientific expertise necessary to maintain its complex
calendars.
The fall has been laid at the door of overpopulation, overuse of natural resources,
and drought. It is true that the Maya were numerous; archaeologists agree that more
people lived in the heartland in 800 A.D. than today. And the Maya indeed had stretched
the meager productive capacity of their homeland. The evidence for drought is
compelling, too. Four independent lines of evidence—ethnohistoric data; correlations
between Yucatán rainfall and measured temperatures in western Europe; measurements
of oxygen variants in lake sediments associated with drought; and studies of titanium
levels in the Caribbean floor, which are linked to rainfall—indicate that the Maya
heartland was hit by a severe drought at about the time of its collapse. Water levels
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eceded so deeply, the archaeologist Richardson Gill argued in 2000, that “starvation and
thirst” killed millions of Maya. “There was nothing they could do. There was nowhere
they could go. Their whole world, as they knew it, was in the throes of a burning, searing,
brutal drought…. There was nothing to eat. Their water reservoirs were depleted, and
there was nothing to drink.”
The image is searing: a profligate human swarm unable to overcome the anger of
Nature. Yet Gill’s critics dismissed it. Turner, the Clark geographer, was skeptical about
the evidence for the killer drought. But even if it happened, he told me, “The entire Maya
florescence took place during a prolonged dry period.” Because they had spent centuries
managing scarce water supplies, he thought it unlikely that they would have fallen quick
victim to drought.
Moreover, the collapse did not occur in the pattern one would expect if drought
were the cause: in general, the wetter southern cities fell first and hardest. Meanwhile,
northern cities like Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, and Coba not only survived the dearth of rain,
they prospered. In the north, in fact, the areas with the poorest natural endowments and
the greatest susceptibility to drought were the most populous and successful. “How and
why, then,” asked Bruce H. Dahlin, an archaeologist at Howard University, “did the onset
of prolonged drought conditions simultaneously produce a disaster in the southern and
central lowlands—where one would least expect it—and continued growth and
development in the north, again where one would least expect it?”
Dahlin argued in 2002 that Chichén Itzá had adapted to the drought by instituting
“sweeping economic, military, political, and religious changes.” Previous Maya states
had been run by all-powerful monarchs who embodied the religion and monopolized
trade. Almost all public announcements and ceremonies centered on the figure of the
paramount ruler; in the stelae that recount royal deeds, the only other characters are,
almost always, the king’s family, other kings, and supernatural figures. Beginning in the
late ninth or early tenth century A.D., public monuments in Chichén Itzá deemphasized
the king, changing from official narratives of regal actions to generalized, nontextual
images of religion, commerce, and war.
In the new regime, economic power passed to a new class of people: merchants
who exchanged salt, chocolate, and cotton from Chichén Itzá for a host of goods from
elsewhere in Mesoamerica. In previous centuries trade focused on symbolic goods that
directly engaged the king, such as jewelry for the royal family. During the drought,
something like markets emerged. Dahlins calculated that the evaporation pans outside a
coastal satellite of Chichén Itzá would have produced at least three thousand tons of salt
for export every year; in return, the Maya acquired tons of obsidian for blades,
semiprecious stones for jewelry, volcanic ash for tempering pottery, and, most important,
maize. Like Japan, which exports consumer electronics and imports beef from the United
States and wheat from Australia, Chichén Itzá apparently traded its way through the
drought.
The contrast between north and south is striking—and instructive. The obvious
difference between them was the century and a half of large-scale warfare in the south.
Both portions of the Maya realm depended on artificial landscapes that required constant
attention. But only in the south did the Maya elite, entranced by visions of its own glory,
take its hands off the switch. Drought indeed stressed the system, but the societal
disintegration in the south was due not to surpassing inherent ecological limits but the
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political failure to find solutions. In our day the Soviet Union disintegrated after drought
caused a series of bad harvests in the 1970s and 1980s, but nobody argues that climate
ended Communist rule. Similarly, one should grant the Maya the dignity of assigning
them responsibility for their failures as well as their successes.
Cahokia and the Maya, fire and maize: all exemplify the new view of indigenous
impacts on the environment. When scholars first increased their estimates of Indians’
ecological management they met with considerable resistance, especially from ecologists
and environmentalists. The disagreement, which has ramifying political implications, is
encapsulated by Amazonia, the subject to which I will now turn. In recent years a
growing number of researchers has argued that Indian societies there had enormous
environmental impacts. Like the landscapes of Cahokia and the Maya heartland, some
anthropologists say, the great Amazon forest is also a cultural artifact—that is, an
artificial object.
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Amazonia
WHAT ORELLANA SAW
The biggest difficulty in reconstructing the pre-Colombian past is the absence of
voices from that past. Mesoamerican peoples left behind texts that are slowly giving up
their secrets, but in other areas the lack of written languages has left a great silence. Hints
of past events can be found in Native American oral traditions, to be sure, but these are
concerned more with interpreting eternal truths than the details of journalism and history.
The Bible has much to teach, yet professors must use it judiciously, supplementing it with
other sources, when they teach ancient Middle Eastern history. In the same way,
preserved Indian lore throws a brilliantly colored but indirect light on the past. To
understand long-ago Indian lives, one cannot avoid the accounts of the first literate
people who saw them: European swashbucklers, fortune hunters, and missionaries.
As historical sources, colonial reports leave much to be desired. Their authors
often were adversaries of the Indians they wrote about, usually did not speak the
necessary languages, and almost always had an agenda other than empathetic description
of indigenous folkways. Some wrote to further their careers; others, to score political
points. Nevertheless these chronicles cannot be dismissed out of hand for these reasons.
Used carefully, they can corroborate, even illuminate.
Consider Gaspar de Carvajal, author of the first written description of the
Amazon, an account reviled for its inaccuracies and self-serving descriptions almost since
the day it was released. Born in about 1500 in the Spanish town of Extremadura, Carvajal
joined the Dominican order and went to South America to convert the Inka. He arrived in
1536, four years after Atawallpa’s fall. Francisco Pizarro, now governor of Peru, was
learning that to avoid outbreaks of feckless violence he needed to keep his men occupied
at all times. One of the worst troublemakers was his own half brother, Gonzalo Pizarro.
At the time, conquistador society was abuzz with stories of El Dorado, a native king said
to possess so much gold that in an annual ritual he painted his body with gold dust and
then rinsed off the brilliant coating in a special lake. After centuries of these baths, gold
dust carpeted the lake floor. A lake of gold! To twenty-first-century ears the story sounds
preposterous, but it did not to Gonzalo Pizarro, who had already helped seize an empire
laden with jewels and precious metals. When he decided to search for El Dorado,
Francisco encouraged him—he practically shoved Gonzalo out the door. In 1541 Gonzalo
left the high Andean city of Quito at the head of an expedition of 200 to 280 Spanish
soldiers (accounts differ), 2,000 pigs, and 4,000 highland Indians, the latter slaves in all
but name. Accompanying the troops as chaplain was Gaspar de Carvajal.
Gonzalo’s quest descended rapidly from the quixotic to the calamitous. Having no
idea where to find El Dorado, he blundered randomly for months about the eastern
foothills of the Andes, then as now a country of deep forest. Because the mountains catch
all the moisture from the Amazon winds, the terrain is as wet as it is steep. It is also
pullulatingly alive: howling with insects, hot and humid as demon’s breath, perpetually
shaded by mats of lianas and branches. Within weeks most of the horses died, their
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hooves rotting in the mire. So did most of the Indian laborers, felled by being worked to
exhaustion in a hot, humid land twelve thousand feet below their cool mountain home.
Having lost their beasts of burden, animal and human, the conquistadors painfully
cobbled together a crude boat and floated their guns and heavy equipment down the Napo
River, an upper tributary of the Amazon. Meanwhile, the soldiers slogged along the
banks, a parallel but more laborious course.
The forest grew yet thicker, the countryside less inhabited. Soon they were utterly
alone. “Not a bark dimpled the waters,” William H. Prescott wrote in his History of the
Conquest of Peru. “No living thing was to be seen but the wild tenants of the wilderness,
the unwieldy boa, and the loathsome alligator basking on the borders of the stream.” With
no Indian villages to rob for supplies, the expedition ran short of food. The forest around
them had plenty of food, but the Spaniards didn’t know which plants were edible. Instead
they ate all the surviving pigs, then the dogs, and then turned to spearing lizards. More
and more men were sick. Having previously heard vague tales of a wealthy country
further down the Napo, Francisco de Orellana, Gonzalo Pizarro’s second-in-command
and cousin, suggested that he split off part of the expedition to see if he could obtain
supplies. Pizarro agreed, and Orellana set off in the expedition’s prized boat on
December 26, 1541, with a crew of fifty-nine, Carvajal among them.
Nine days and six hundred miles down the Napo, Orellana found villages with
food—a society he called Omagua. His men gorged themselves and then considered their
options. They did not relish the prospect of ferrying supplies back up the river to Gonzalo
Pizarro and the rest of the expedition; rowing against the current would be difficult, and,
as they knew all too well, there was nothing to eat along the way. Orellana decided
instead to leave the starving Gonzalo to his fate and take the boat to the mouth of the
river, which he correctly believed emptied into the Atlantic (incorrectly, he believed that
the river was not too long).
Knowing that Gonzalo, in the unlikely event that he survived, would regard
Orellana’s actions as treasonous, Carvajal took upon himself the task of creating a
justificatory paper trail: an account “proving” that the choice to abandon Gonzalo had
been forced on them. To satisfy Spanish legal requirements, Orellana made a show of
resigning his temporary command rather than leave Gonzalo. The crewmen, Carvajal
claimed, then swore “by God…by the sign of the Cross, [and] by the four sacred
Gospels” that they wanted Orellana to return as leader. Bowing to pressure, Orellana
accepted the post. Then they built a second vessel and set off downstream.
Their worries about Gonzalo’s reaction were well-founded. Half a year after
Orellana’s departure, the surviving members of his expedition staggered in rags into
Quito. Gonzalo was among them. He wasted no time in demanding Orellana’s arrest and
execution. In taking the boat, most of the canoes, and some of the weapons from his
famished troops, Orellana had displayed, Gonzalo said, “the greatest cruelty that ever
faithless men have shown.”
Meanwhile, Orellana and his men had spent five months floating down the
Amazon, Carvajal recording every moment. It is inconceivable that their surroundings
did not induce awe. Vastly bigger than any river in Europe or Asia, the Amazon contains
a fifth of the earth’s above-ground fresh water. It has islands the size of countries and
masses of floating vegetation the size of islands. Half a dozen of its tributaries would be
world-famous rivers anywhere else. A thousand miles up from the Atlantic, the river is
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still so broad that at high water the other side is only a faint dark line on the horizon.
Ferries take half an hour to make the crossing. Seagoing vessels travel all the way up to
Iquitos, Peru, 2,300 miles from the river’s mouth, the furthest inland deep-ocean port in
the world.
The conventional view of Amazonia: endless untouched forest. The forest indeed
exists, but humankind has long been one of its essential components.
The prospect of a mutiny trial constantly in mind, Carvajal wrote relatively little
about his extraordinary surroundings. Instead he focused on creating a case for the value
and necessity of Orellana’s journey. To the contemporary eye, he didn’t have much to
work with. His case had three main elements: (1) the forcing of Orellana’s hand (see
above); (2) the crew’s devotion to the Holy Virgin; and (3) the degree to which they
suffered en route. In truth, the last does not seem feigned. In Carvajal’s account, pain and
sickness alternate with starvation. “We were eating leather from the seats and bows of
saddles,” runs one all-too-typical reminiscence. “Not to mention the soles and even whole
shoes [with] no sauce other than hunger itself.”
Encounters with the river’s inhabitants were frequent and often hostile. Passing
the native domains strung along the river was like passing a line of angry hives.
Forewarned of the visitors’ arrival by drum and messenger, Indians awaited them behind
trees and in concealed canoes, shot fusillades of poisoned arrows, then withdrew. A few
miles downriver would be the next group of Indians, and the next attack. Except when
demanding food, the expedition navigated as far as possible from every village.
Nonetheless three Spaniards died in battle. An arrow hit Carvajal in the face, blinding
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him in one eye.
Carvajal wrote little about the peoples who spent so much time trying to kill him.
But the small amount he did write depicts a crowded and prosperous land. Approaching
what is now the Peru-Brazil border, he noted that “the farther we went the more thickly
populated and the better did we find the land.” One 180-mile stretch was “all inhabited,
for there was not from village to village a crossbow shot.” The next Indians down the
river had “numerous and very large settlements and very pretty country and very fruitful
land.” And just beyond them were villages crowded cheek by jowl—“there was one day
when we passed more than twenty.” In another place Carvajal saw a settlement “that
stretched for five leagues without there intervening any space from house to house.”
Near the mouth of the Tapajós, about four hundred miles from the sea, Orellana’s
ragtag force came across the biggest Indian settlement yet—its homes and gardens lined
the riverbank for more than a hundred miles. “Inland from the river, at a distance of one
or two leagues…there could be seen some very large cities.” A floating reception force of
more than four thousand Indians—two hundred war canoes, each carrying twenty or
thirty people—greeted the Spanish. Hundreds or thousands more stood atop the bluffs on
the south bank, waving palm leaves in synchrony to create a kind of football wave that
Carvajal clearly found peculiar and unnerving. His attention riveted to the scene, he for
once noted some details. Approaching in their great canoes, the Indian soldiers wore
brilliant feather cloaks. Behind the canoe armada was a floating orchestra of horns, pipes,
and rebecs like three-stringed lutes. When the music played, the Indians attacked. Only
the tremendous surprise created by the Spaniards’ firearms provided the opportunity to
escape.
Orellana died in 1546 on a second, failed voyage to the Amazon. Carvajal went
on to achieve modest renown as a priest in Lima, dying peacefully at the age of eighty.
Neither Orellana’s journey nor Carvajal’s account of it received the attention they
merited; indeed, Carvajal’s work was not formally published until 1894. Part of the
reason for the lack of attention is that Orellana didn’t conquer anything—he simply
managed to emerge with his life. But another part is that few people believed Carvajal’s
description of the Amazon.
The main cause for skepticism was his notorious claim that halfway down the
river the Spaniards were attacked by tall, topless women who fought without quarter and
lived without men. When these “Amazons” wanted to reproduce, Carvajal explained,
they captured males. After the women’s “caprice [had] been suited,” they returned the
spent abductees to their homes. Any bravo who saw the prospect of some caprice-suiting
as inviting enough to visit the Amazons himself, Carvajal solemnly warned, “would go a
boy and return an old man.” This absurd story was viewed as proof of Carvajal’s
untrustworthiness and Orellana’s faithlessness. “Mentirosa [full of lies],” historian
Francisco López de Gómara scoffed soon after Carvajal finished his manuscript.
Physical scientists were especially unwilling to accept his depiction of the
Amazon. To ecologists, the great tropical forest in South America was and is the planet’s
greatest wilderness, primeval and ancient, an Edenic zone touched by humankind lightly
if at all. Constrained by its punishing climate, poor soil, and lack of protein, these
scientists argue, large-scale societies have never existed—can never exist—in the river
basin. Amazonia thus could not have been the jostling, crowded place described by
Carvajal.
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As anthropologists have learned more about the vagaries of fieldwork, they have
treated Carvajal more kindly. “He may not have been making up the Amazons out of
whole cloth,” William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist, told me. “It is possible that he
saw female warriors, or warriors whom he believed were female. If he asked Indians
about them, he could have misunderstood their answers. Or he could have understood
them correctly, but not understood that his informants were pulling his leg. We now
understand that ethnography is complex, and it’s easy to go wrong.” In recent years, these
blanket dismissals have been challenged.
More important, anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, and historians who
were reassessing the environmental impact of indigenous cultures in North and Central
America inevitably turned to the tropical forest. And in growing numbers researchers
came to believe that the Amazon basin, too, bears the fingerprints of its original
inhabitants. Far from being the timeless, million-year-old wilderness portrayed on
calendars, these scientists say, today’s forest is the product of a historical interaction
between the environment and human beings—human beings in the form of the populous,
long-lasting Indian societies described by Carvajal.
Such claims raise the hackles of many conservationists and ecologists. Amazonia,
activists warn, is sliding toward catastrophe so rapidly that saving it must become a
global priority. With bulldozers poised to destroy one of the planet’s last great wild
places, environmentalists say, claiming that the basin comfortably housed large numbers
of people for millennia is so irresponsible as to be almost immoral—it is tantamount to
giving developers a green light.
The Amazon is not wild, archaeologists and anthropologists retort. And claiming
that it is will, in its ignorance, worsen the ecological ailments that activists would like to
cure. Like their confreres elsewhere in the Americas, Indian societies had built up a
remarkable body of knowledge about how to manage and improve their environment. By
denying the very possibility of such practices, these researchers say, environmentalists
may hasten, rather than halt, the demise of the forest.
GREEN PRISON
The nineteenth-century naturalist Thomas Belt may have said it best. In what
Darwin called “the best of all natural history journals,” Belt set down what has become
the classic image of the tropical forest: a gigantic, teeming expanse, wildly diverse
biologically but otherwise undifferentiated. “A ceaseless round of ever-active life weaves
the forest scenery of the tropics into one monotonous whole,” as he put it. And since
Belt’s day, terms like “Amazonia” and “Amazon basin” are often used as if they referred
to a single, homogeneous entity.
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AMAZON BASIN
This practice irritates professional geographers no end. Strictly speaking,
“Amazon basin” refers to the drainage of the Amazon and its tributaries. “Amazonia,” by
contrast, refers to the bigger region bounded by the Andes to the west, the Guiana Shield
to the north, and the Brazilian Shield to the south. And neither is coterminous with the
“Amazonian rainforest.” To begin with, not all of the “Amazonian rainforest” is
rainy—parts of it receive little more precipitation per year than New York City. On top of
that, about a third of Amazonia is not forest but savanna—the Beni, in Bolivia, is the
biggest chunk. The river’s floodplain and that of its tributaries take up another 5 to 10
percent of the basin. Only about half of Amazonia is upland forest—vines overhead in a
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tangle like sailing ships rigged by drunks; tree branches in multiple layers; beetles the
size of butterflies and butterflies the size of birds—the ecosystem that people outside the
region usually mean when they say “Amazon.”
To biologists, the apparent fertility of the upland forest is a sham. This thesis was
laid out clearly in Paul Richards’s classic 1952 study, The Tropical Rain Forest. To be
sure, Richards said, the Amazon forest is uniquely diverse and beautiful. But its
exuberant canopy is a mask covering an impoverished base. The base is the region’s poor
soil. No matter what its original condition, the intense rain and heat of the forest have
eroded its surface, washed out all its minerals, and decomposed vital organic compounds.
As a result, much of the red Amazonian soil is weathered, harshly acid, and almost bereft
of essential nutrients—one reason ecologists refer to the tropical forest as a “wet desert.”
Correspondingly, most nutrients in tropical forests are stored not in the soil, as in
temperate regions, but in the vegetation that covers it. When leaves or branches fall, the
carbon and nitrogen in the debris are rapidly reabsorbed by the hyperefficient root
systems of tropical plants. If loggers or farmers clear away the vegetation, they also
remove the local supply of nutrients. Normally the forest quickly fills in bare spots, such
as those created when big trees fall, and damage is kept to a minimum. But if the opening
is too large or the ground is kept clear too long, the sun and rain decompose whatever
organic matter remains and bake the surface into something resembling brick in both
color and impermeability. In short order, the land becomes almost incapable of sustaining
life. Thus the tropical forest, despite its fabulous vitality, exists on a knife edge.
These views were picked up and amplified in Amazonia: Man and Culture in a
Counterfeit Paradise, by Betty J. Meggers, the Smithsonian archaeologist. Published in
1971, it may be the most influential book ever written about the Amazon. Agriculture,
Meggers pointed out, depends on extracting the wealth of the soil. With little soil wealth
to extract, she said, Amazonian farmers face inherent ecological limitations. The only
form of agriculture they can practice for a long time is “slash-and-burn,” or “swidden,” as
it is sometimes known. Farmers clear small fields with axes and machetes, burn off the
chaff and refuse, and plant their seeds. The ash gives the soil a quick shot of nutrients,
giving the crop a chance. As the crops grow, the jungle rapidly returns—weeds first, then
fast-growing tropical trees. In the few years before forest recovers the plot, farmers can
eke something out of the land.
Slash-and-burn, Meggers told me, is “a superb response to ecological limits.”
Farmers grab a few harvests, but the soil is not bared to rain and sun long enough to incur
permanent damage. Switching from field to field to field, swidden farmers live in the
forest without destroying the ecosystems they depend on: a supple, balanced harmony.
This ancient lifeway survives today, according to this theory, in the ring-shaped
compounds of the Yanomamo. (Most of the Yanomamo actually live around South
America’s other huge river system, the Orinoco, but they are seen as emblematic of
Amazonia as well.) Gliding nearly nude beneath the trees, cultivating their temporary
gardens, the Yanomamo are often said to be windows into the past, living much the same
lives as their great-great-great-grandparents. Their long-term existence has not damaged
the forest, Meggers told me, a testament to slash-and-burn’s power to keep human groups
sustainably within the rigid ecological limits of the tropics.
A second reason that slash-and-burn is required, Meggers told me, is the region’s
propensity for suffering “mega-Niño events”—superstrong El Niño climate swings that
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occur every three hundred to five hundred years. In the archaeological record, she said,
“We’re able to pick up severe droughts related to these mega-Niño events. What these
did was reduce the food supply. The 1998 El Niño was a small example—they saw
droughts, forest fires, and reduction of resources from when trees don’t flower.” Forest
fires in the northern state of Roraima that year claimed such a huge area that Brazil
requested aid from the United Nations. In the past, Meggers said, “the well-established
groups that were sitting in one territory for several hundred years couldn’t survive [the
droughts], so they broke up. We see this repeated at least four times in the last two
millennia.” In other words, any Indians who tried to go beyond slash-and-burn to
permanent cultivation would be knocked back to slash-and-burn by a mega-Niño.
Slash-and-burn, she said, “avoids the risks, including the risk of growth—it’s the smart
thing to do.”
Ethnographic celebrities, the Yanomamo are often portrayed as windows into the
past, inhabitants of a forest wilderness they have inhabited, almost unchanged, for
millennia. Recent studies have cast doubt on this picture. Indeed, the Yanomamo are
relative newcomers to their homeland, many of them moving there only in the
seventeenth century as they fled European diseases and cruelty further south. Some
scholars believe their societies were originally so much larger and more materially
complex that what is often pictured as an almost idyllic, “natural” existence is in fact a
life in poor exile.
Swidden, Meggers admitted, has a major drawback: it cannot yield enough to
support a complex society. More intensive farming might produce the requisite surplus,
but cannot be sustained; the plowed land, exposed to the elements, is destroyed in as little
as a decade. Even with slash-and-burn, ecologists say, the forest can take as much as a
hundred years to return completely to its previous state. European-style agriculture would
not only fall victim to mega-Niños, it would permanently ruin the forest soils.
Carvajal therefore misunderstood what he saw, Meggers told me. Or else he had
simply made up everything, and not just the Amazons. Caught in a lush, green trap,
Indian villages could not possibly have grown as large as he reported—indeed, Meggers
once proposed an upper limit of a thousand on their population. And the villages could
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not have been the sophisticated places he described, with their chiefly rulers, social
classes, and specialized laborers (those military musicians on the Tapajós, for example).
That was why archaeologists and anthropologists had come across the ruins of complex
societies throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes, but saw only hunter-gatherers and
slash-and-burners in Amazonia.
“The basic thing about the Amazon is that these people had a long-term period to
learn about and experience and benefit from their knowledge of the environment,”
Meggers said. “Any group that over-exploited their environment was going to be dead.
The ones that survived, the knowledge got built into their ideology and behavior with
taboos and other kinds of things.” Having reached the optimal cultural level for their
environment, she explained, Amazon Indian lives changed little, if at all, for at least two
thousand years.
As proof, Meggers pointed to Marajó, an island more than twice the size of New
Jersey that sits like a gigantic stopper in the mouth of the Amazon. The island, low and
often swampy, is created by the collision of the Amazon with the sea, which forces the
river to disgorge dissolved sediments. Much of the island is submerged during the rainy
season, and even in the dry summer pieces of the mazy shoreline are constantly calving
off like icebergs and falling into the water. Yet despite the unpromising setting, the
Marajóara created a sophisticated society there from about 800 to 1400 A.D.
The island’s pottery, some of it very large, has long been celebrated for its painted
and incised representations of animals and plants, which are ornately entangled in a
profusion that recalls the forest itself. The skillful pottery indicated that Marajó was a
large-scale society—the only one then known in all of Amazonia. In the late 1940s
Meggers and her husband, archaeologist Clifford J. Evans, decided to learn more.
The decision was ambitious. Archaeologists have traditionally avoided tropical
forests, because the climate destroys all wood, cloth, and organic material—except for
ceramics and stone, there is little left to dig up. And the Amazon basin, essentially an
astoundingly large river valley made of deposited mud, has almost no stone, so
archaeologists wouldn’t even find that. (Because the nearest deposits of metal ore were in
the Andes, thousands of miles upstream, Amazonian peoples had no metal.)
At Marajó, Meggers and Evans soon noticed an oddity: the earliest traces of
Marajóara culture were the most elaborate. As the centuries advanced, the quality of the
ceramics inexorably declined. The designs became cruder, the repertoire of themes
reduced, the technical skill diminished. At the beginning, some grave sites were more
elaborate than others, a testament to social stratification. Later on, all the dead were
treated in the same mundane way. Early in their history, the Marajóara must have sneered
at the lowly cultures on their borders. But as the forest, in a process out of Heart of
Darkness, stripped away the layers of civilization, they became indistinguishable from
their neighbors. A hundred years before Columbus, Meggers told me, they were blasted
by a mega-Niño and then overrun by one of their erstwhile inferiors. The history of
Marajó was all fall and no rise.
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Betty Meggers
In a boldly written article in American Anthropologist in 1954, Meggers
proclaimed the implications:
There is a force at work to which man through his culture must bow. This
determinant operates uniformly regardless of time, place (within the forest), psychology
or race. Its leveling effect appears to be inescapable. Even modern efforts to implant
civilization in the South American tropical forest have met with defeat, or survive only
with constant assistance from the outside. In short, the environmental potential of the
tropical forest is sufficient to allow the evolution of culture to proceed only to the level
represented by [slash-and-burn farmers]; further indigenous evolution is impossible, and
any more highly evolved culture attempting to settle and maintain itself in the tropical
forest environment will inevitably decline to the [slash-and-burn] level.
The impossibility of passing beyond slash-and-burn, Meggers said, was a
consequence of a more general “law of environmental limitation of culture.” And she
stated the law, italicizing its importance: “The level to which a culture can develop is
dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies.”
How did Marajó escape, even temporarily, the iron grasp of its environment? And
why was there no sign of its initial climb past ecological limits, only of its subsequent
collapse before them? Meggers and Evans provided the answers three years later in an
influential monograph. Marajó, they said, was not actually an Amazonian society. In fact,
it was a failed cutting from a more sophisticated culture in the Andes, a cousin of Wari or
Tiwanaku. Stranded in the wet desert of the Amazon, the culture struggled to gain its
footing, tottered a few steps, and died.
Counterfeit Paradise was the product of more than twenty years of research. But
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that was not the sole reason for the book’s influence. Meggers’s message of limitation,
published within a year of the first Earth Day, resonated in the ears of readers newly
converted to the ecological movement. Since then countless campaigns to save the
rainforest have driven home its lesson: development in tropical forests destroys both
forests and their developers. Promulgated in ecology textbooks, Meggers’s argument
became a wellspring of the campaign to save rainforests, one of the few times in recent
history that humankind has actually tried to profit from the lessons of the past.
Yet even as the themes of Counterfeit Paradise spread to the worlds of natural
science and political activism, Meggers’s ideas exerted ever-diminishing influence in
archaeology itself. From her distinguished post at the Smithsonian, she battled on behalf
of the law of environmental limitation. But her main accomplishment may have been
inadvertently to keep new ideas about Amazonian history from the public eye—ideas
about its past that may, according to their advocates, play a role in safeguarding its future.
PAINTED ROCK CAVE
“Rather than admiration or enthusiasm,” the great Brazilian writer Euclides da
Cunha wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, “the feeling that overtakes one when
first encountering the Amazon is foremost one of disappointment.” Like today’s
ecotourism brochures, the accounts of the great river basin in da Cunha’s time celebrated
its immensity but rarely dwelled on its extreme flatness—in the Amazon’s first 2,900
miles the vertical drop is only 500 feet. “It is as though the place lacks vertical lines,” da
Cunha complained. “In a few hours the observer gives in to the fatigue of the unnatural
monotony.” Every year the river floods—not a disaster, but a season. A channel that is
one mile wide in the dry season can become thirty miles wide in the wet. After five
months the water recedes, leaving behind a layer of rich sediment. From the air, the river
seems to ooze like dirty metal through a wash of green utterly devoid of the romantic
crags, arroyos, and heights that signify wildness and natural spectacle to most people of
European descent.
The area around the lower-Amazon city of Santarém is an exception. West of
town, the Tapajós pours into the Amazon from the south, creating an inland bay that at
high water is fifteen miles wide and a hundred miles long. The flood rises high enough to
cover low river islands in knee-deep water, leaving their trees to stand out like miracles in
mid-channel. Fishers from town ride their bicycles into little boats, parking the bikes
while working by hanging them in the offshore trees. The bay is lined with bluffs high
enough to cast long shadows. Almost five hundred years ago, Indians lined the edge of
the rise, taunting Orellana by waving palm fronds.
On the opposite, northern side of the river are a series of sandstone ridges that
reach down from the Guiana Shield in the north, halting close to the water’s edge. Five
hundred feet high and more, they rise above the canopy like old tombstones. Many of the
caves in the buttes are splattered with ancient pictographs—rock paintings of hands, stars,
frogs, and human figures, all reminiscent of Joan Miró, in overlapping red and yellow
and brown. In the 1990s one of these caves, Caverna da Pedra Pintada—Painted Rock
Cave—drew considerable attention in archaeological circles.
Wide and shallow and well lighted, Painted Rock Cave is less thronged with bats
than some of the other caves. The arched entrance is twenty feet high and electric with
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gaudy imagery. Out front is a sunny natural patio, suitable for picnicking, that is edged by
a few big rocks. During my visit I ate a sandwich atop a particularly inviting stone and
looked through a stand of peach palms over the treetops to the water seven miles away.
The people who created the petroglyphs, I thought, must have done about the same thing.
Painted Rock Cave has attracted scientists since the mid-nineteenth century, when
Alfred Russel Wallace visited it. Wallace, a naturalist, was more interested in the palm
trees outside the caves than the people who had lived inside them. The latter were left to
an archaeologist, Anna C. Roosevelt, then at the Field Museum. To her exasperation,
press accounts of Roosevelt’s work often stress her descent from Theodore Roosevelt
(she is his great-granddaughter), as if her lineage were more noteworthy than her
accomplishments. In truth, though, she has demonstrated something of her ancestor’s
flare for drama and controversy.
Roosevelt first came to public attention when she reexcavated Marajó in the
1980s. By using a battery of new remote-sensing techniques—including total-station
topographic mapping, ground-penetrating radar, and scanning for slight variations in
magnetic field strength, electrical conductivity, and electrical resistance—she was able to
build up a picture of Marajó far more detailed than Meggers and Evans could have in the
1940s and 1950s, when they worked there. Detailed—and different.
Published in 1991, Roosevelt’s initial report on Marajó was like the antimatter
version of Counterfeit Paradise. A few scientists had challenged Meggers’s ideas;
Roosevelt excoriated them from top to bottom. Far from being a failed offshoot of
another, higher culture, she concluded, Marajó was “one of the outstanding indigenous
cultural achievements of the New World,” a powerhouse that lasted for more than a
thousand years, had “possibly well over 100,000” inhabitants, and covered thousands of
square miles. Rather than damaging the forest, Marajó’s “large population, highly
intensive subsistence, [and] major systems of public works” had improved it: the places
formerly occupied by the Marajóara showed the most luxuriant and diverse growth. “If
you listened to Meggers’s theory, these places should have been ruined,” Roosevelt told
me.
Rather than pressing down on Marajó, she said, the river and forest opened up
possibilities. In highland Mexico, “it wasn’t easy to get away from other people. With all
those rocky hillsides and deserts, you couldn’t readily start over. But in the Amazon, you
could run away—strike off in your canoe and be gone.”
As in Huckleberry Finn? I asked.
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In this reconstruction based on archaeologist Anna Roosevelt’s view of Marajóara
society, houses cluster on artificial platforms above the wet ground while farm fields
stretch into the island’s interior.
“If you like,” she said. “You could go [along the river] where you wanted and
homestead—the forest gives you all kinds of fruit and animals, the river gives you fish
and plants. That was very important to societies like Marajó. They had to be much less
coercive, much more hang-loose, much more socially fluid, or people wouldn’t stay
there.” Compared with much of the rest of the world at that time, people in the Amazon
“were freer, they were healthier, they were living in a really wonderful civilization.”
Marajó never had the grand public monuments of a Tenochtitlan or a Qosqo,
Roosevelt noted, because its leaders “couldn’t compel the labor.” Nonetheless, she said,
Marajó society was “just as orderly and beautiful and complex. The eye-opener was that
you didn’t need a huge apparatus of state control to have all that. And this had been
entirely missed by Meggers, who couldn’t see past her environmental-determinist
theories. And I said so much in my book.”
Meggers reacted to Roosevelt’s critiques by sneering at her “polemical tone” and
“extravagant claims.” In concluding that large areas of Marajó had been continuously
inhabited, Roosevelt had (according to Meggers) committed the beginner’s error of
confusing a site that had been occupied many times by small, unstable groups for a
single, long-lasting society. Cultural remains, Meggers explained to me, “build up on
areas of half a kilometer or so, because [shifting Indian groups] don’t land exactly on the
same spot. The decorated types of pottery don’t change much over time, so you can pick
up a bunch of chips and say, ‘Oh, look, it was all one big site!’ Unless you know what
you’re doing, of course.” From her point of view, claiming that Amazonian societies
could escape their environmental constraints was little more than a display of scientific
ignorance, the archaeological version of trying to design perpetual-motion machines.
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Anna Roosevelt
To Meggers’s critics, the ecological-limits argument was not only wrong, but
familiar—and familiar in an uncomfortable way. From the first days of contact,
Europeans have perceived the Indians of the tropics as living in timeless stasis. Michel de
Montaigne admiringly claimed in 1580 that the inhabitants of the Amazon had “no
knowledge of numbers, no terms for governor or political superior, no practice of
subordination or of riches or poverty…no clothing, no agriculture, no metals.” They
abided, he said, “without toil or travail” in a “bounteous” forest that “furnishes them
abundantly with all they need…. They are still in that blessed state of desiring nothing
beyond what is ordained by their natural necessities: for them anything further is merely
superfluous.”
Montaigne’s successors quickly turned his views upside-down. Like him, they
viewed Amazonians as existing outside history, but they now regarded this as a bad thing.
The French natural historian Charles Marie de la Condamine retraced Orellana’s journey
in 1743. He emerged with great regard for the forest—and none for its inhabitants. The
peoples of the Peruvian Amazon were nothing more than “forest animals,” he said.
“Before making them Christians, they must first be made human.” In softened form,
Condamine’s views persisted into the twentieth century. “Where man has remained in the
tropics, with few exceptions, he has suffered arrested development,” the prominent
geographer Ellen Churchill Semple remarked in 1911. “His nursery has kept him a
child.” To be sure, advocates of environmental limitations today do not endorse the racist
views of the past, but they still regard the original inhabitants of the Amazon as trapped
in their environment like flies in amber. Meggers’s “law of environmental limitation of
culture,” her critics in essence say, is nothing but a green variant of Holmberg’s Mistake.
Over time, the Meggers-Roosevelt dispute grew bitter and personal; inevitable in
a contemporary academic context, it featured charges of colonialism, elitism, and
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membership in the CIA. Particularly vexing to Meggers was that some of the same
people who demanded minutely detailed proof for pre-Clovis sites had cheerfully
accepted Roosevelt’s revisionism about Marajó. A big, prosperous city rising up on its
own in the stifling Amazon forest? Meggers could not contain her disbelief. “I wish a
psychologist would look into this,” she said to me.
Meanwhile, Roosevelt went on to Painted Rock Cave. On the cave floor what
looked to me like nothing in particular turned out to be an ancient midden: a refuse heap.
Roosevelt’s team slowly scraped away sediment, traveling backward in time with every
inch. Even when the traces of human occupation ceased, they kept digging down. (“You
always go a meter past sterile,” she told me.) A few inches below what she had thought
would be the last layer of human habitation she hit another—a culture, Roosevelt said
later, that wasn’t supposed to be there. It was as much as thirteen thousand years old.
Painted Rock Cave was occupied at roughly the same time that the Clovis culture
was thriving to the north. But Amazon paleo-Indians didn’t live in the same way as their
northern counterparts, Roosevelt said. They didn’t make or use Clovis points. They didn’t
hunt big game (almost none exists in the Amazon). Instead they plucked wild fruits from
the forest, painted handprints on the walls, and ate the Amazon’s 1,500 species of fish,
especially the 500-pound piraruçu, the world’s biggest freshwater fish. And then, after
1,200 years, these early people left the cave for good.
Painted Rock Cave became inhabited again in about 6000 B.C. Probably it was no
more than temporary shelter, a refuge when floodwaters got too high. People could have
brought in loads of turtles and shellfish, built a fire in the shelter of the cave, and enjoyed
the feel of dry land. In any case these people—Roosevelt called them the Paituna culture,
after a nearby village—had ceramic bowls, red- to gray-brown. Found at Painted Rock
Cave and other places in the area, it is the oldest known pottery in the Americas.
And so there were two occupations: one very old, with ceramics; the other even
older, without them. To Roosevelt, the first settlement of Painted Rock Cave
demonstrated that the Amazon forest was not settled by a copy or offshoot of Clovis. This
early culture was a separate entity—another nail in the coffin of the Clovis-as-template
theory, to her way of thinking. The second occupation, with its early and apparently
independent development of ceramics, demonstrated something equally vital: Amazonia
was not a dead end where the environment ineluctably strangled cultures in their cradles.
It was a source of social and technological innovation of continental importance.
By about four thousand years ago the Indians of the lower Amazon were growing
crops—at least 138 of them, according to a recent tally. The staple then as now was
manioc (or cassava, as it is sometimes called), a hefty root that Brazilians roast, chop, fry,
ferment, and grind into an amazing variety of foods. To this day, no riverside table is
complete without a bowl of farofa: crunchy, toasted manioc meal, vaguely resembling
grated Parmesan cheese, which Amazonians sprinkle on their food with abandon. To
farmers, manioc has a wonderful advantage: it can grow practically anywhere, in any
conditions. In Santarém I met a woman who told me that the asphalt street in front of her
home had just been ripped up by the municipal authorities. Underneath the pavement,
which had been laid down years before, was a crop of manioc.
Manioc has always been the Amazonian staple. To this day, it is ubiquitous in the
slash-and-burn plots that surround every riverside hamlet. These little, shifting farms look
like unchanged remnants of the past. But that idea apparently is mistaken. Rather than
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eing the timeless indigenous adaptation portrayed in ecology textbooks, many
archaeologists now view slash-and-burn agriculture as a relatively modern technique
whose spread was driven by European technology. The main reason is the stone ax.
Living in the world’s thickest forest, the inhabitants of the Amazon basin had to
remove a lot of trees if they wanted to accomplish practically anything. For this task the
stone ax was their basic tool. Unfortunately, stone axes are truly wretched tools. With a
stone ax, one does not so much cut down a tree as use the ax to beat a section of the trunk
to pulp, weakening the base until the tree can no longer support itself. In the outskirts of
the central Amazonian city of Manaus, a researcher let me whack at a big Brazil nut tree
with a locally made replica of a traditional stone ax. After repeated blows I had created a
tiny dent in the cylindrical wall of the bole. It was like attacking a continent. “Those
things suck,” the researcher said, shaking his head.
In the 1970s Robert Carneiro, of the American Museum of Natural History,
measured the labor required to clear a field before the advent of steel. He set people to
work with stone axes in thickly forested parts of Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela. Many of
the trees were four feet in diameter or more. In Carneiro’s experiments, felling a single
four-foot tree with an indigenous stone ax took 115 hours—nearly three weeks of
eight-hour days. With a steel ax, his workers toppled trees of similar size in less than
three hours. Carneiro’s team used stone axes to clear about an acre and a half, a typical
slash-and-burn plot, in the equivalent of 153 eight-hour days. Steel axes did the job in the
equivalent of eight workdays—almost twenty times faster. According to surveys by
Stephen Beckerman, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University, Amazonian
slash-and-burners are able to work their plots for an average of three years before they
are overwhelmed. Given that farmers also must hunt, forage, build houses and trails,
maintain their existing gardens, and perform a hundred other tasks, Carneiro wondered
how they could have been able to spend months on end banging on trees to clear new
fields every three years.
Unsurprisingly, people with stone implements wanted metal tools as soon as they
encountered them—the prospective reduction in workload was staggering. When
Columbus landed, according to William Balée, the Yanomamo lived in settled villages in
the Amazon basin. Battered by European diseases and slave raiding, many fled to the
Orinoco, becoming wandering foragers. In the seventeenth century they acquired steel
tools, and used them to make the return journey from seminomadic hunter-gatherers to
agriculturalists who lived in more or less permanent villages. So precious did European
axes become during this time, according to Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist at Rutgers
University, that when a source appeared the Yanomami would relocate whole villages to
be near it. Steel tools, he told me, “had a major, transformative effect on all the trade and
marriage relations in a whole area. They led to new trade networks, they led to new
political alliances, they even led to war.” Researchers have often described the
Yanomamo as “fierce,” aggressive sorts whose small villages are constantly at violent
odds with one another. In Ferguson’s estimation, one cause of the endemic conflict
observed by Western anthropologists and missionaries was the anthropologists and
missionaries themselves, who gave their subjects “literally boatloads” of steel
tools—axes, hatchets, machetes—to ingratiate themselves. At a stroke, the village hosting
the Westerners would gleam with wealth; its neighbors would seek a share of the
undeserved bounty; conflict would explode. “Steel to the Yanomamo was like gold for
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the Spanish,” Ferguson said. “It could push fairly ordinary people to do things that they
wouldn’t consider doing otherwise.” (The anthropologists and missionaries there
vehemently deny Ferguson’s claims. But so far as I am aware they did not call his
scenario impossible. Rather, they said that to avoid unhappy consequences they had
carefully controlled the amount of gift giving.)
Metal tools largely created slash-and-burn agriculture, William M. Denevan, the
Wisconsin geographer, told me. “This picture of swidden as this ancient practice by
which Indians kept themselves in a timeless balance with Nature—that is mostly or
entirely a myth, I think. At least there’s no evidence for it, and a fair amount of evidence
against it, including the evidence of simple logic.” Slash-and-burn, supposedly a
quintessentially Amazonian trait, “is a modern intrusion.”
A similar phenomenon seems to have taken place in North America, where
Indians were widely said to have practiced slash-and-burn as part of their habit of living
lightly on the land. Dismissing the data to back up these claims as “gossamer,” the
geographer William E. Doolittle of the University of Texas noted in 2000 that most
colonial accounts showed Indians clearing their fields permanently, even ripping stumps
out to prevent them from sprouting. “Once fields were cleared, the intent was to cultivate
them permanently, or at least for very long periods of time.” As populations rose,
“farmers cleared new fields from the remaining forests.” Slash-and-burn was a product of
European axes—and European diseases, which so shrank Indian groups that they adopted
this less laborious but also less productive method of agriculture.
In the Amazon, the turn to swidden was unfortunate. Slash-and-burn cultivation
has become one of the driving forces behind the loss of tropical forest. Although swidden
does permit the forest to regrow, it is wildly inefficient and environmentally unsound.
The burning sends up in smoke most of the nutrients in the vegetation—almost all of the
nitrogen and half the phosphorus and potassium. At the same time, it pours huge amounts
of carbon dioxide into the air, a factor in global warming. (Large cattle ranches are the
major offenders in the Amazon, but small-scale farmers are responsible for up to a third
of the clearing.) Fortunately, it is a relatively new practice, which means it has not yet
had much time to cause damage. More important, the very existence of so much healthy
forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever
Indians did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.
RAINDROP PHYSICS
The papaya orchard was so robust and healthy that it looked like an
advertisement—the background image behind a celebrity endorser of a new papaya drink.
Sweating in the equatorial sun, some of the researchers admiringly fingered the plump,
pendulous green fruit, each the size of a baby’s head, wrapped in clusters around the
trees’ sturdy trunks. Other scientists bent down and with equal approbation scooped up
handfuls of dirt. The road to the plantation had been cut into the Amazon’s famously poor
soil—it was the blaring orangered of cheap makeup, almost surreally bright against the
great dark green leaves of the forest. But in the shade of the papaya trees the soil was
dark brown, with the moist, friable feel that gardeners seek.
At first glance, the soil seemed similar to what one would find in, say, the grain
belts of North America or Europe. After a more careful inspection, though, it looked
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entirely different, because it was full of broken ceramics. The combination of good soil,
successful agriculture, and evidence of past Indian inhabitation was what had brought the
scientists to the farm. I had been invited to tag along.
The orchard was about a thousand miles up the Amazon, two hours by ferry and
bus from Manaus. Manaus, the biggest city on the river, is situated on the north bank of
the Amazon, hard by its junction with the Negro River, a major tributary.
*24 Between
the two rivers is a tongue of land that, depending on your point of view, is either almost
destroyed by development or quite lightly inhabited considering its proximity to a city of
a million people. Near the tip of the tongue is the small village of Iranduba: a bush-pilot
airport, a half-dozen lackadaisical stores, some bars with jukeboxes loud enough to knock
birds from the trees, and docks for loading local farmers’ produce. A few miles outside
Iranduba, on a bluff above the Amazon, stood the papaya orchard. It was one of the many
small riverside farms operated by the descendants of Japanese immigrants.
In 1994 Michael Heckenberger, now at the University of Florida in Gainesville,
and James B. Petersen, now at the University of Vermont in Burlington, decided to look
for potential archaeological sites in the central Amazon. With a team of Brazilian
scientists, Meggers had surveyed much of the river and its tributaries in the 1970s and
1980s and concluded there was little of archaeological relevance—further proof of the
inescapability of ecological constraints. Believing that Meggers’s survey had been too
coarse-grained, Heckenberger and Petersen decided to search a single area intensively.
Joined by Eduardo Goés Neves of the University of São Paulo, several dozen of Neves’s
students, and, later, Robert N. Bartone, of the University of Maine at Farmington, they
found more than thirty sites at the Amazon-Negro junction, four of which they excavated
fully. The papaya farm was one of the four. Now Neves, Petersen, and Bartone were
leading a score of visiting researchers and a journalist on a tour of the site.
From the shade of a doorway, the father of the family watched us mill around
with a tolerant smile. A teenage girl stood outside, listlessly sweeping at a cloud of
yellow butterflies. Through the loosely placed boards in the wall floated the bark and
jabber of a talk-radio show about the latest soccer perfidy from Argentina, Brazil’s hated
rival. Although it was winter, the midday sun was hot enough to make sweat start out
from the skin.
At the edge of the papaya grove were ten low earthen mounds that the team had
identified as human-made. Carbon dating indicated that they were constructed in about
1000 A.D. The archaeologists had begun opening up the largest of the mounds. Already
they had discovered nine burials, one body placed in a big funerary urn, all apparently
interred at the same time. Because the scientists were unlikely to have uncovered the
area’s only concentration of human remains in their first, exploratory test pit, they
believed that the entire mound was likely to be full of burials—hundreds of them. “That
suggests thousands of people lived here,” Neves said. “In 1000 A.D., that’s a big place.”
Shoving back his baseball cap, Neves levered himself into the excavation site, a
six-foot, rectangular hole with the right-angled corners and precisely vertical walls that
are a hallmark of archaeological investigation. One of the visiting researchers passed
down a Munsell soil-color chart. Resembling strips of paint-color samples, these are used
by pedologists (soil scientists) to classify soils. Neves scraped the wall lightly, exposing
fresh earth, and pinned the chart to the wall with a big-headed nail. From the top of the
dig he dangled a measuring tape—alternating ten-centimeter strips of red, white, and
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green—to indicate depth. Digital cameras ratcheted and whined. It was a vest-pocket
version of the inspection of Folsom by the graybeards.
Neves had a little trouble hanging the tape because he couldn’t find a place where
it wouldn’t get snagged on the broken ceramics protruding from the walls. They bristled
from the side of the dig in a profusion that reminded me of the Beni mounds, hundreds of
miles upstream. Some of the pieces seemed to form horizontal layers. As in the Beni, the
ceramics had apparently been smashed deliberately, perhaps to build up the surface.
I asked Petersen, a ceramics specialist, how many plates and bowls and cups were
in the mounds. He pulled out a scrap of paper and a pen and scribbled some numbers. In a
minute or two he looked up. “This is a rough, back-of-the-envelope-type estimate,” he
warned, showing me the result: the single mound we were standing on might contain
more than forty million potsherds. “Think of the industry required to produce that much
pottery,” Neves said. “Then they just smash it. Look at the way they piled up this good
soil [to make the burial mound]—it’s all wasteful behavior. I don’t think scarcity was a
problem here.”
The ecological constraints on tropical soils are in large part due to the
gravitational energy of raindrops. Rainfall, drumming down day in and day out, pounds
the top few inches of earth into slurry from which nutrients are easily leached and which
itself easily washes away. In uncut forest, the canopy intercepts precipitation, absorbing
the physical impact of its fall from the clouds. The water eventually spills from the
leaves, but it hits the ground less violently. When farmers or loggers clear the tree cover,
droplets shoot at the ground with more than twice as much force.
Slash-and-burn minimizes the time in which the ground is unprotected. Intensive
agriculture is much more productive but maximizes the land’s exposure. This painful
trade-off is why ecologists argue that any attempt by tropical forest societies to grow
beyond small villages has always been doomed to fail.
According to Charles R. Clement, an anthropological botanist at the Brazilian
National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA) in Manaus, though, the first Amazonians
did avoid the Dilemma of Rainfall Physics. Speaking broadly, their solution was not to
clear the forest but to replace it with one adapted to human use. They set up shop on the
bluffs that mark the edge of high water—close enough to the river to fish, far enough to
avoid the flood. And then, rather than centering their agriculture on annual crops, they
focused on the Amazon’s wildly diverse assortment of trees.
In his view, the Amazon’s first inhabitants laboriously cleared small plots with
their stone axes. But rather than simply planting manioc and other annual crops in their
gardens until the forest took them over, they planted selected tree crops along with the
manioc and managed the transition. Of the 138 known domesticated plant species in the
Amazon, more than half are trees. (Depending on the definition of “domesticated,” the
figure could be as high as 80 percent.) Sapodilla, calabash, and tucumá; babaçu, açai, and
wild pineapple; coco-palm, American-oil palm, and Panama-hat palm—the Amazon’s
wealth of fruits, nuts, and palms is justly celebrated. “Visitors are always amazed that
you can walk in the forest here and constantly pick fruit from trees,” Clement said.
“That’s because people planted them. They’re walking through old orchards.”
Peach palms—the trees through which I looked at the Amazon from Painted Rock
Cave—are Clement’s favorite example. Giddily tall and straight, they have up to a dozen
stalks, with a protective mat of spikes wrapped around the bottom of the tree. The
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protection is little needed; peach palm wood is hard enough that in the Beni it was used
for saw blades. Bundles of orange or red fruit hang like clusters of bocce balls from the
base of the fronds. The fruit is soaked with oil and rich in beta-carotene, vitamin C, and,
surprisingly, protein. When dried, the white or pink pulp makes flour for thin, tortilla-like
cakes; when boiled and smoked, it becomes hors d’oeuvres; when cooked and fermented,
it makes beer. (The sap also makes a kind of wine.) Two crops a year are not uncommon;
in terms of yield per acre, peach palms are typically much more productive than rice,
beans, or maize. Trees begin producing fruit after three to five years and can continue for
another seventy years. Like strawberries, peach palm throws out adventitious shoots.
With a little care, these can be harvested for heart-of-palm—very tasty heart-of-palm, in
my experience. Bactris gasipaes, as scientists call it, has more than two hundred common
names: pupunha, cahipay, tembe, pejibaye, chontaduro, pijuayo. To Clement, the
proliferation of names suggests the plant was used for many purposes by many cultures.
In the 1980s and early 1990s Clement measured peach palms throughout the
Amazon basin. He learned that several physical characteristics, including fruit size, lay
on a gradient with those apparently closest to the wild state in western Amazonia, near
the Beni; the implication was that the tree might first have been cultivated there. Using a
different method, Jorge Mora-Urpí, one of Clement’s collaborators, concluded that
Indians might have bred the modern peach palm by hybridizing palms from several areas,
including the Peruvian Amazon. Whatever the origin, people domesticated the species
thousands of years ago and then spread it rapidly, first through Amazonia and then up
into the Caribbean and Central America. Bactris gasipaes was in Costa Rica 1,700 to
2,300 years ago and probably earlier. By the time of Columbus, one seventeenth-century
observer wrote, Native Americans valued it so highly “that only their wives and children
were held in higher regard.”
Unlike maize or manioc, peach palm can thrive with no human attention.
Tragically, this quality has proven to be enormously useful. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries many Amazonian Indians, the Yanomamo among them, abandoned
their farm villages, which had made them sitting ducks for European diseases and slave
trading. They hid out in the forest, preserving their freedom by moving from place to
place; in what Balée calls “agricultural regression,” these hunted peoples necessarily gave
up farming and kept body and soul together by foraging. The “Stone Age tribespeople in
the Amazon wilderness” that captured so many European imaginations were in large part
a European creation and a historical novelty; they survived because the “wilderness” was
largely composed of their ancestors’ orchards. “These old forests, called fallows, have
traditionally been classified as high forest (pristine forest on well-drained ground) by
Western researchers,” Balée wrote in 2003. But they “would not exist” without “human
agricultural activities.” Indeed, Amazonians typically do not make the distinction
between “cultivated” and “wild” landscapes common in the West; instead they simply
classify landscapes into scores of varieties, depending on the types of species in each.
After we had spoken for a while Clement took me out of his office and into
INPA’s experimental forest. To my untrained eye, it looked much the same as the forests
around the lodges outside Manaus that attract ecotourists, except that INPA staffers kept
down the undergrowth. There was the same cool green light from the canopy, the same
refulgent smell, the same awe-inspiring sense of variety. The air vibrated with the same
inharmonic racket of squealing, burbling, croaking, and cheeping birds. Dribbling down
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some of the tree trunks were little runnels that looked like dried sap. On a previous visit
to the Amazon I had seen runnels just like these on a rubber tree in an abandoned
plantation. Thinking it was a drip of latex sap, I plucked at one. It was the cover for a
termite superhighway. Termites boiled out of the little tunnel and all over my hand.
Termites bite. Flapping my hand wildly, I leapt back from the tree. My sandaled foot
landed on a ground-wasp nest. In this way I learned why some Amazonians have a
jaundiced view of biodiversity. On Clement’s tour I kept my hands to myself.
It was July—winter in the Amazon, the worst time of the year for fruit.
Nevertheless, Clement was able to find yellow bacuri and purple açai. He plucked what
looked like a four-foot version of a string bean from a branch, split it lengthwise, and
showed me flattened, shiny seeds arrayed along its length like teeth in a jaw. Each seed
was the size of a thumb bone and nestled in a fluffy white coating. “Try this,” he said.
“It’s the ice-cream bean.” I put a seed in my mouth and sucked on it. The coating did
taste quite like vanilla ice cream, and was just as refreshing. Three or four more fruits
followed, each equally strange to me. (This is what people like about biodiversity.) Peach
palm was not in season, but he found another member of the same genus. The fruit, when
peeled, was unappetizing—quite like soggy cardboard in color, texture, and flavor.
Clement squeezed some pulp. Oil dribbled from his fingers to the ground. “This’ll put
some calories into you,” he said.
Planting their orchards for millennia, the first Amazonians slowly transformed
large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In the
country inhabited by the Ka’apor, on the mainland southeast of Marajó, centuries of
tinkering have profoundly changed the forest community. In Ka’apor-managed forests,
according to Balée’s plant inventories, almost half of the ecologically important species
are those used by humans for food. In similar forests that have not recently been
managed, the figure is only 20 percent. Balée cautiously estimated, in a widely cited
article published in 1989, that at least 11.8 percent, about an eighth, of the nonflooded
Amazon forest was “anthropogenic”—directly or indirectly created by humans.
Some researchers today regard this figure as conservative. “I basically think it’s
all human created,” Clement told me. So does Erickson, the University of Pennsylvania
archaeologist who told me in Bolivia that the lowland tropical forests of South America
are among the finest works of art on the planet. “Some of my colleagues would say that’s
pretty radical,” he said. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State
University of New York in Binghamton, “lots” of researchers believe that “what the
eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in
fact has been managed by people for millennia.” The phrase “built environment,”
Erickson argued, “applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes.”
GIFT FROM THE PAST
“Landscape,” in this case, is meant exactly—Amazonian Indians literally created
the ground beneath their feet. According to Susanna Hecht, a geographer at the
University of California at Los Angeles, researchers into upland Amazonia took most of
their soil samples along the region’s highways, which indeed passed through areas with
awful soil—some regions were so saturated with toxic aluminum that they are now being
mined for bauxite. A few scientists, though, found patches of something better. “In part
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ecause of the empty-Amazon model,” Hecht told me, these were “seen as anomalous
and insignificant.” But in the 1990s researchers began studying these unusual regions of
terra preta do Índio—rich, fertile “Indian dark earth” that anthropologists believe was
made by human beings.
Throughout Amazonia, farmers prize terra preta for its great productivity; some
have worked it for years with minimal fertilization. Among them are the owners of the
papaya orchard I visited, who have happily grown crops on their terra preta for two
decades. More surprising still, the ceramics in the farm’s terra preta indicate that the soil
has retained its nutrients for as much as a millennium. On a local level, terra preta is
valuable enough for locals to dig it up and sell as potting soil, an activity that, alas, has
already destroyed countless artifacts. To the consternation of archaeologists, long planters
full of ancient terra preta, complete with pre-Columbian potsherds, greet visitors to the
Santarém airport. Because terra preta is subject to the same punishing conditions as the
surrounding bad soils, “its existence is very surprising,” according to Bruno Glaser, a
chemist at the Institute of Soil Science and Soil Geography at the University of Bayreuth,
*25
Germany. “If you read the textbooks, it shouldn’t be there.”
Because careful surveys of Amazon soils have never been taken, nobody knows
the amount and distribution of terra preta. Woods has guessed that terra preta might
represent as much as 10 percent of the Amazon basin, an area the size of France. A
recent, much more conservative estimate is that it covers .1 to .3 percent of the basin, a
few thousand square miles. The big difference between these numbers matters less than
one might expect: a few thousand square miles of farmland was enough to feed the
millions in the Maya heartland.
Most big terra preta sites are on low bluffs at the edge of the floodplain.
Typically, they cover five to fifteen acres, but some encompass seven hundred or more.
The layer of black soil is generally one to two feet deep but can reach more than six feet.
According to a recent study led by Dirse Kern, of the Museu Goeldi in Belém, terra preta
is “not associated with a particular parent soil type or environmental condition,”
suggesting that it was not produced by natural processes. Another clue to its human
origin is the broken ceramics with which it is usually mixed. “They practiced agriculture
here for centuries,” Glaser told me. “But instead of destroying the soil, they improved it,
and that is something we don’t know how to do today” in tropical soils.
As a rule, terra preta has more “plant-available” phosphorus, calcium, sulfur, and
nitrogen than is common in the rain forest; it also has much more organic matter, better
retains moisture and nutrients, and is not rapidly exhausted by agricultural use when
managed well. The key to terra preta’s long-term fertility, Glaser says, is charcoal: terra
preta contains up to sixty-four times more of it than surrounding red earth. Organic
matter “sticks” to charcoal, rather than being washed away or attaching to other,
nonavailable compounds. “Over time, it partly oxidizes, which keeps providing sites for
nutrients to bind to.” But simply mixing charcoal into the ground is not enough to create
terra preta. Because charcoal contains few nutrients, Glaser argued, “high-nutrient
inputs—excrement and waste such as turtle, fish, and animal bones—are necessary.”
Special soil microorganisms are also likely to play a role in its persistent fertility, in the
view of Janice Thies, a soil ecologist who is part of a Cornell University team studying
terra preta. “There are indications that microbial biomass is higher in terra preta than in
other forest soils,” she told me, which raises the possibility that scientists might be able to
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create a “package” of charcoal, nutrients, and microfauna that could be used to transform
bad tropical soil into terra preta.
Despite the charcoal, terra preta is not a by-product of slash-and-burn agriculture.
To begin with, slash-and-burn simply does not produce enough charcoal to make terra
preta—the carbon mostly goes into the air in the form of carbon dioxide. Instead, Indians
apparently made terra preta by a process that Christoph Steiner, a University of Bayreuth
soil scientist, has dubbed “slash-and-char.” Instead of completely burning organic matter
to ash, ancient farmers burned it incompletely to make charcoal, then stirred the charcoal
into the soil. In addition to its benefits to the soil, slash-and-char releases much less
carbon into the air than slash-and-burn, which has large potential implications for climate
change. Trees store vast amounts of carbon in their trunks, branches, and leaves. When
they die or people cut them down, the carbon is usually released into the atmosphere,
driving global warming. Experiments by Makoto Ogawa of the Kansai Environmental
Engineering Center, near Kyoto, Japan, demonstrated that charcoal retains its carbon in
the soil for up to fifty thousand years. “Slash-and-char is very clever,” Ogawa told me.
“Nobody in Europe or Asia that I know of ever understood the properties of charcoal in
soil.”
Indians are still making terra preta in this way, according to Hecht, the UCLA
geographer. Hecht spent years with the Kayapó, in central Amazonia, watching them
create “low-biomass” fires “cool enough to walk through” of pulled-up weeds, cooking
waste, crop debris, palm fronds, and termite mounds. Burning, she wrote, is constant: “To
live among the Kayapó is to live in a place where parts of the landscape smolder.” Hecht
regards Indian fire as an essential part of the Amazonian landscape, as it was in the
forests of eastern North America. “We’ve got to get over this whole Bambi syndrome,”
she told me, referring to the movie’s forest-fire scene, which has taught generations of
children that burning wildlands is evil. “Let the Kayapó burn the rainforest—they know
what they’re doing.”
In a preliminary test run at creating terra preta, Steiner, Wenceslau Teixeira of
the Brazilian Agricultural Research Enterprise, and Wolfang Zech of the University of
Bayreuth applied a variety of treatments involving charcoal and fertilizers for three years
to rice and sorghum plots outside Manaus. In the first year, there was little difference
among the treatments (except for the control plots, in which almost nothing grew). By the
second year, Steiner said, “the charcoal was really making a difference.” Plots with
charcoal alone grew little, but those treated with a combination of charcoal and fertilizer
yielded as much as 880 percent more than plots with fertilizer alone. His “terra preta”
was this productive, Steiner told me, despite making no attempt to re-create the ancient
microbial balance.
Beginning a little more than two thousand years ago, the central and lower
Amazon were rocked by extreme cultural change. Arawak-speaking groups migrated in
from the south and west, sometimes apparently driving Tupí-speaking groups north and
east. Sedentary villages appeared. And so did terra preta. No one yet knows if or how
these events were related. By about the time of Christ the central Amazon had at least
some large, settled villages—Neves, Petersen, and Bartone excavated one on a high bank
about thirty miles up the Río Negro. Judging by carbon dating and the sequence of
ceramics, they believe the site was inhabited in two waves, from about 360 B.C., when
terra preta formation began, to as late as 1440 A.D. “We haven’t finished working, but
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there seems to be a central plaza and some defensive ditches there,” Petersen told me.
The plaza was at least a quarter mile long; the ditch, more than three hundred feet long
and up to eighteen feet wide and six feet deep: “a big, permanent settlement.”
Terra preta showed up at the papaya plantation between 620 and 720 A.D. By
that time it seems to have been underneath villages throughout the central Amazon.
Several hundred years later it reached the upper Xingú, a long Amazon tributary with its
headwaters deep in southern Brazil. People had lived around the Xingú for a long time,
but around 1100 or 1200 A.D., Arawak-speaking people appear to have moved in,
jostling shoulders with people who spoke a Tupí-Guaraní language. In 2003
Heckenberger, who had worked with Petersen and Neves, announced in Science that in
this area he and his colleagues had turned up remains of nineteen large villages linked by
a network of wide roads “in a remarkably elaborate regional plan.” Around these
settlements, which were in place between approximately 1250 and 1400 A.D., the
Xinguanos built “bridges, artificial river obstructions and ponds, raised causeways,
canals, and other structures…a highly elaborate built environment, rivaling that of many
contemporary complex societies of the Americas and elsewhere.” The earlier inhabitants
left no trace of terra preta; the new villages quickly set down thick deposits of black
earth. “To me,” Woods said, “it looks as if someone invented it, and the technique spread
to the neighbors.”
Because Amazonia lacks stone and metal and its hot, wet climate rapidly destroys
wood and cloth, material traces of past societies are hard to find. The main exception is
pottery, striking examples of which survive, such as the highly decorative vessels from
the Santarém area (right, this one probably made in the seventeenth century). Stone,
being rare, was reserved for special items such as the pestles (left) used to grind the
hallucinogenic snuff yobo.
One of the biggest patches of terra preta is on the high bluffs at the mouth of the
Tapajós, near Santarém. First mapped in the 1960s by the late Wim Sombroek, director
of the International Soil Reference and Information Center in Wageningen, the
Netherlands, the terra preta zone is three miles long and half a mile wide, suggesting
widespread human habitation—exactly what Orellana saw. The plateau has never been
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carefully excavated, but observations by geographers Woods and Joseph McCann of the
New School in New York City indicate that it is thick with ceramics. If the agriculture
practiced in the lower Tapajós were as intensive as in the most complex cultures in
precontact North America, Woods told me, “you’d be talking something capable of
supporting about 200,000 to 400,000 people”—making it at the time one of the most
densely populated places in the world.
Woods was part of an international consortium of scientists studying terra preta.
If its secrets could be unraveled, he said, it might improve the expanses of bad soil that
cripple agriculture in Africa—a final gift from the peoples who brought us tomatoes,
maize, manioc, and a thousand different ways of being human.
“Betty Meggers would just die if she heard me saying this,” Woods told me.
“Deep down her fear is that this data will be misused.” In 2001, Meggers charged in an
article in Latin American Antiquity that archaeologists’ claims that the Amazon could
support intensive agriculture were effectively telling “developers [that they] are entitled
to operate without restraint.” These researchers had thus become unwitting “accomplices
in the accelerating pace of environmental degradation.” Centuries after the conquistadors,
she lamented, “the myth of El Dorado is being revived by archaeologists.”
Doubtless her political anxieties are not without justification, although—as some
of her sparring partners observed—it is difficult to imagine greedy plutocrats “perusing
the pages of Latin American Antiquity before deciding to rev up the chainsaws.” But the
new picture doesn’t automatically legitimate burning down the forest. Instead it suggests
that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big
chunks of Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians
fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of
terra-forming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.
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The Artificial Wilderness
A THOUSAND KUDZUS EVERYWHERE
Until about 200 million years ago Eurasia and the Americas were lashed together
in a single landmass that geologists call Pangaea. Pangaea broke into pieces, sending the
continents drifting like barges across the ocean floor. For millions of years, the separate
fragments of Pangaea had almost no communication. Evolution set their species spinning
off on separate trajectories, and the flora and fauna of each land diverged so far from
each other that the astounded Columbus remarked that “all the trees were as different
from ours as day from night, and so the fruits, the herbage, the rocks, and all things.”
Columbus was the first to see the yawning biological gap between Europe and the
Americas. He was also one of the last to see it in pure form: his visit, as Alfred Crosby
put it, initiated the process of knitting together the seams of Pangaea. Ever since 1492,
the hemispheres have become more and more alike, as people mix the world’s organisms
into a global stew. Thus bananas and coffee, two African crops, become the principal
agricultural exports of Central America; maize and manioc, domesticated in
Mesoamerica and Amazonia respectively, return the favor by becoming staples in tropical
Africa. Meanwhile, plantations of rubber trees, an Amazon native, undulate across
Malaysian hillsides; peppers and tomatoes from Mesoamerica form the culinary
backbones of Thailand and Italy; Andean potatoes lead Ireland to feast and famine; and
apples, native to the Middle East, appear in markets from Manaus to Manila to
Manhattan. Back in 1972 Crosby invented a term for this biological ferment: the
Columbian Exchange.
By knitting together the seams of Pangaea, Columbus set off an ecological
explosion of a magnitude unseen since the Ice Ages. Some species were shocked into
decline (most prominent among them Homo sapiens, which in the century and a half after
Columbus lost a fifth of its number, mainly to disease). Others stumbled into new
ecosystems and were transformed into environmental overlords: picture-book illustrations
of what scientists call “ecological release.”
In ecological release, an organism escapes its home and parachutes into an
ecosystem that has never encountered it before. The majority of such escapees die
rapidly, unable to thrive or reproduce in novel surroundings. Most of the survivors find a
quiet niche and settle in, blending inconspicuously with the locals. But a few, finding
themselves in places with few or none of their natural enemies, look around with the
hopeful incredulity of juvenile delinquents who discover the mall’s security cameras are
broken—and wreak havoc. In their home ecosystems these species have, like all living
things, a full complement of parasites, microbes, viruses, and insect predators to shorten
and immiserate their lives. Suddenly free of this burden, they can burst out and
overwhelm the landscape.
The Japanese grind the roots of a low vine called kuzu (Pueraria lobata) into a
white powder that thickens soup and is alleged to have curative properties; they also plant
the species on highway shoulders as erosion-preventing ground cover. In the 1930s the
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U.S. Civilian Conservation Corps planted millions of kuzu seedlings to fight soil loss, a
major fear in the era of the Dust Bowl. Renamed “kudzu,” the vine prevented so much
erosion that villages across the U.S. Southeast celebrated kudzu festivals and crowned
kudzu queens. People harvested it like hay and fed it to cows; entrepreneurs marketed
kudzu cereal, kudzu dog food, and kudzu ketchup. In the early 1950s rural areas suddenly
awoke from their trance and discovered that kudzu was eating them alive. Without its
natural enemies the plant grew so fast that southerners joked they had to close their
windows at night to keep it out. Worse, the plants themselves grew bigger than is usual in
Japan—nobody knows why. Engulfing fields in dense mats of root and vine, kudzu
swarmed over entire farms, clambered for miles along telephone lines, wrapped up trees,
barns, and houses like a green Christo. The roots sank so deep that the vine was nearly
impossible to remove. In 1996 the federal government estimated that kudzu had
swallowed seven million acres. The figure is now much larger.
What happened after Columbus was like a thousand kudzus everywhere.
Throughout the hemisphere ecosystems cracked and heaved like winter ice. Echoes of the
biological tumult resound through colonial manuscripts. Colonists in Jamestown broke
off from complaining about their Indian neighbors to complain about the depredations of
the rats they had accidentally imported. Not all the invaders were such obvious pests,
though. Clover and bluegrass, in Europe as tame and respectable as accountants, in the
Americas transformed themselves into biological Attilas, sweeping through vast areas so
quickly that the first English colonists who pushed into Kentucky found both species
waiting for them. Peaches, not usually regarded as a weed, proliferated in the southeast
with such fervor that by the eighteenth century farmers feared that the Carolinas would
become “a wilderness of peach trees.”
South America was hit especially hard. Endive and spinach escaped from colonial
gardens and grew into impassable, six-foot thickets on the Peruvian coast; thousands of
feet higher, mint overwhelmed Andean valleys. In the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay,
the voyaging Charles Darwin discovered hundreds of square miles strangled by feral
artichoke. “Over the undulating plains, where these great beds occur, nothing else can
now live,” he observed. Wild peach was rampant in South America, too. Peachwood,
Darwin discovered, had become “the main supply of firewood to the city of Buenos
Ayres.” Some invasions cancel each other out. Peru’s plague of endive may have been
checked by a simultaneous plague of rats, which the sixteenth-century writer Garcilaso de
la Vega reported “bred in infinite numbers, overran the land, and destroyed the crops.”
A phenomenon much like ecological release can occur when a species suddenly
loses its burden of predators. The advent of mechanized fishing in the 1920s drastically
reduced the number of cod from the Gulf of Maine to the Grand Banks. With the cod
gone, the sea urchins on which they fed had no enemies left. Soon a spiny carpet covered
the bottom of the gulf. Sea urchins feed on kelp. As their populations boomed, they
destroyed the area’s kelp beds, creating what icthyologists call a “sea urchin barrens.”
In this region, cod was the species that governed the overall composition of the
ecosystem. The fish was, in ecological jargon, a “keystone” species: one “that affects the
survival and abundance of many other species,” in the definition of Harvard biologist
Edward O. Wilson. Keystone species have disproportionate impact on their ecosystems.
Removing them, Wilson explained, “results in a relatively significant shift in the
composition of the [ecological] community.”
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Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere.
Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and
raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon, growing maize, manioc, and the Eastern
Agricultural Complex, Native Americans had been managing their environment for
thousands of years. As Cahokia shows, they made mistakes. But by and large they
modified their landscapes in stable, supple, resilient ways. Some milpa areas have been
farmed for thousands of years—time in which farmers in Mesopotamia and North Africa
and parts of India ruined their land. Even the wholesale transformation seen in places like
Peru, where irrigated terraces cover huge areas, were exceptionally well done. But all of
these efforts required close, continual oversight. In the sixteenth century, epidemics
removed the boss.
American landscapes after 1492 were emptied—“widowed,” in the historian
Francis Jennings’s term. Suddenly deregulated, ecosystems shook and sloshed like a cup
of tea in an earthquake. Not only did invading endive and rats beset them, but native
species, too, burst and blasted, freed from constraints by the disappearance of Native
Americans. The forest that the first New England colonists thought was primeval and
enduring was actually in the midst of violent change and demographic collapse. So
catastrophic and irrevocable were the changes that it is tempting to think that almost
nothing survived from the past. This is wrong: landscape and people remain, though
greatly altered. And they have lessons to heed, both about the earth on which we all live,
and about the mental frames we bring to it.
ONE OUT OF EVERY FOUR BIRDS
When passenger pigeons drank, they stuck their heads beneath the surface of the
water until they were eye deep. When they walked, their heads bobbed awkwardly and
they looked around from side to side. Passenger pigeons were greedy eaters with terrible
manners; if they found some food they liked just after finishing a meal, they would vomit
what they had previously eaten and dig in. Gobbling their chow, they sometimes
twittered in tones musical enough that people mistook them for little girls. They gorged
on so many beechnuts and acorns that they sometimes fell off their perches and burst
apart when they hit the ground. But in flight they were angelic: they cut through the air
with such speed and grace that they were called “blue meteors.”
When passenger pigeons found an area with grain or nuts to eat, they formed a
long, linear front that advanced forward, heads peck-peck-pecking at the ground. Acorns,
beechnuts, and chestnuts; strawberries, huckleberries, and blackberries; wheat, oats, and
maize—all went down the pigeons’ iridescently feathered gullets. To grab their share, the
pigeons at the rear constantly fluttered over the heads of their compatriots and landed at
the leading edge of the front. Then the birds in the back flew over them. The line of birds
advanced in a continuous swirl, the conservationist John Muir recalled, “revolving
something like a wheel with a low buzzing wing roar that could be heard a long way off.”
Passenger pigeons traveled in massive assemblies, billions strong, that rained
enough excrement to force people indoors. As a boy Muir saw a mob of birds sweep
“thousands of acres perfectly clean of acorns in a few minutes.” Pigeons destroyed farm
fields so often that the bishop of Quebec formally excommunicated the species in 1703.
A hundred and ten years later the artist and naturalist John J. Audubon saw a flock
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passing overhead in a single cloud for three whole days. “The air,” Audubon wrote later,
“was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse.”
When he visited their roost, the “dung lay almost two inches deep” for miles.
The Pigeons, arriving by thousands, alighted everywhere, one above another, until
solid masses as large as hogsheads were formed on the branches all round. Here and there
the perches gave way under the weight with a crash, and, falling to the ground, destroyed
hundreds of the birds beneath, forcing down the dense groups with which every stick was
loaded. It was a scene of uproar and confusion. I found it quite useless to speak [over the
roar of wings], or even to shout to those persons who were nearest to me.
According to Arlie W. Schorger, author of a definitive study on the bird, in
Audubon’s day at least one out of every four birds in North America was a passenger
pigeon.
In colonial times, the Haudenosaunee celebrated pigeon roostings by gathering
around the birds for a massive feast. Horatio Jones, captured as a teenager by the Seneca
(one of the six nations in the alliance), participated around 1782 in a mass pigeon hunt
near the Genesee River. The birds, roosting on low branches, were too full and too stupid
to flee. Men knocked them down with poles or toppled the trees they were sitting on.
Children wrung the birds’ necks while women stewed them in pots, smoked them over
fires, and dried them to preserve in storehouses. Sometimes the Seneca ate half a dozen
squabs at a time, necks tied together in a carnivorous sculpture. “It was a festival season,”
Jones later recalled. “Even the meanest dog in camp had his fill of pigeon meat.” In
Haudenosaunee lore, the birds represented nature’s generosity, a species literally selected
by the spirit world to nourish humankind.
Non-Indians, too, saw the pigeon as a symbol of the earth’s richness—“the living,
pulsing, throbbing, and picturesque illustration of the abundance of food, prepared by
bountiful Nature, in all her supreme ecstasy of redundant production of life and energy,”
one businessman/pigeon enthusiast gushed. Colonists grilled the birds, stewed them with
salt pork, and baked them into pies; they plucked their feathers to stuff mattresses,
pickled them in barrels as a winter treat, and fed them to livestock. Incredibly, hunters in
the countryside captured tens of thousands of pigeons in nets and sent the living birds to
urban hunting clubs for target practice.
Then, suddenly, the passenger pigeon vanished—the last bird, Martha, named
after Martha Washington, died on September 1, 1914. The passenger pigeon remained an
emblem of natural bounty, but now it also represented the squandering of that bounty. In
1947 the conservationist Aldo Leopold dedicated a monument to the pigeon near the site
of its greatest recorded nesting, at which hunters slaughtered 1.5 million birds. The
plaque read: “This species became extinct through the avarice and thoughtlessness of
man.”
The pigeon should indeed stand as a rebuke and warning. But if archaeologists are
right it should not be thought of as a symbol of wilderness abundance.
Passenger pigeons’ diet centered on mast, the collective name for acorns,
beechnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, and the like; they also really liked maize. All were
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important foods to the Indians of eastern North America. Thus passenger pigeons and
Native Americans were ecological competitors.
What would be the expected outcome of this rivalry? asked Thomas W.
Neumann, a consulting archaeologist in Atlanta. Neumann noted that Indians had also
vied for mast and maize with deer, raccoons, squirrels, and turkeys. Unsurprisingly, they
hunted all of them with enthusiasm, as documented by the bones found in archaeological
sites. Indeed, as Neumann noted, Indians actually sought out pregnant or nursing does,
which hunters today are instructed to let go. They hunted wild turkey in spring, just
before they laid eggs (if they had waited until the eggs hatched, the poults could have
survived, because they will follow any hen). The effect was to remove competition for
tree nuts. The pattern was so consistent, Neumann told me, that Indians must have been
purposefully reducing the number of deer, raccoons, and turkeys.
Given passenger pigeons’ Brobdingnagian appetites for mast and maize, one
would expect that Indians would also have hunted them and wanted to keep down their
numbers. Thus their bones should be plentiful at archaeological sites. Instead, Neumann
told me, “they almost aren’t there—it looks like people just didn’t eat them.” Pigeons,
roosting en masse, were easy to harvest, as the Seneca hunt showed. “If they are so easy
to hunt, and you expect people to minimize labor and maximize return, you should have
archaeological sites just filled with these things. Well, you don’t.” To Neumann, the
conclusion was obvious: passenger pigeons were not as numerous before Columbus.
“What happened was that the impact of European contact altered the ecological dynamics
in such a way that the passenger pigeon took off.” The avian throngs Audubon saw were
“outbreak populations—always a symptom of an extraordinarily disrupted ecological
system.”
Intrigued by Neumann’s arguments, William I. Woods, the Cahokia researcher,
and Bernd Herrmann, an environmental historian at the University of Göttingen,
surveyed six archaeological studies of diets at Cahokia and places nearby. All were not
far from the site of the huge pigeon roost that Audubon visited. The studies examined
household food trash and found that traces of passenger pigeon were rare. Given that
Cahokians consumed “almost every other animal protein source,” Herrmann and Woods
wrote, “one must conclude that the passenger pigeon was simply not available for
exploitation in significant numbers.”
Some archaeologists have criticized these conclusions on the grounds that
passenger pigeon bones would not be likely to be preserved. If so, their absence would
reveal nothing about whether Indians ate the species. But all six Cahokia projects found
plenty of bird bones, and even some tiny bones from fish; one turned up 9,053 bones
from 72 bird species. “They found a few passenger pigeon bones, but only a few,” Woods
told me. “Now, these were hungry people who were very interested in acquiring protein.
The simplest explanation for the lack of passenger pigeon bones is a lack of passenger
pigeons. Prior to 1492, this was a rare species.”
Passenger pigeons were but one example of a larger phenomenon. According to
the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, North America at the time of Columbus was home
to sixty million bison, thirty to forty million pronghorns, ten million elk, ten million mule
deer, and as many as two million mountain sheep. Sixty million bison! The imagination
shrinks from imagining it. Bison can run for hours at thirty miles per hour and use their
massive, horned skulls like battering rams. Mature animals weigh up to a ton. Sixty
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million of them would have been more than sixty billion pounds of grouchy, fast-moving
mammal pounding the plains.
Seton made his estimate in 1929, and it is still widely quoted today. Ecologists
have since employed more sophisticated theoretical tools to produce new, lower
population estimates; ethologist Dale Lott put the number of bison in “primitive
America” at twenty-four to twenty-seven million in 2002. Nonetheless, most continue to
accept Seton’s basic thesis: the Americas seen by the first colonists were a wildland of
thundering herds and forests with sky-high trees and lakes aswarm with fish.
Increasingly, though, archaeologists demand a caveat. The Americas seen by the first
colonists were teeming with game, they say. But the continents had not been that way for
long. Indeed, this Edenic world was largely an inadvertent European creation.
At the time of Columbus the Western Hemisphere had been thoroughly painted
with the human brush. Agriculture occurred in as much as two-thirds of what is now the
continental United States, with large swathes of the Southwest terraced and irrigated.
Among the maize fields in the Midwest and Southeast, mounds by the thousand stippled
the land. The forests of the eastern seaboard had been peeled back from the coasts, which
were now lined with farms. Salmon nets stretched across almost every ocean-bound
stream in the Northwest. And almost everywhere there was Indian fire.
The Indian impact on American ecosystems was transformative, subtle, and
persistent, as suggested by these photographs of remnant Native American maize hills in
the outskirts of Northampton, Massachusetts, in the 1920 s. Maize had not grown in these
abandoned pastures for centuries, but the handiwork of the land’s original inhabitants
remained for those with eyes to see it.
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Agricultural terraces like these in Peru’s Colca Valley still cover thousands of
square miles in Mesoamerica and the Andes, mute testimony to Native Americans’
enduring success in managing their landscapes.
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This grand Indian irrigation system near Pisco, a coastal town south of Lima, fell
to developers’ bulldozers—the photograph dates from 1931.
South of the Río Grande, Indians had converted the Mexican basin and Yucatán
into artificial environments suitable for farming. Terraces and canals and stony highways
lined the western face of the Andes. Raised fields and causeways covered the Beni.
Agriculture reached down into Argentina and central Chile. Indians had converted
perhaps a quarter of the vast Amazon forest into farms and agricultural forests and the
once-forested Andes to grass and brush (the Inka, worried about fuel supply, were
planting tree farms).
All of this had implications for animal populations. As Cahokia grew, Woods told
me, so did its maize fields. For obvious reasons its farmers did not relish the prospect of
buffalo herds trampling through their fields. Nor did they want deer, moose, or passenger
pigeons eating the maize. They hunted them until they were scarce around their homes.
At the same time, they tried to encourage these species to grow in number farther away,
where they would be useful. “The net result was to keep that kind of animal at arm’s
length,” Woods told me. “The total number of bison, say, seems to have gone down quite
a bit, but they wanted to have them available for hunting in the prairie a couple days’
journey away.”
When disease swept Indians from the land, this entire ecological ancien régime
collapsed. Hernando De Soto’s expedition staggered through the Southeast for four years
in the early sixteenth century and saw hordes of people but apparently didn’t see a single
bison. (No account describes them, and it seems unlikely that chroniclers would have
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failed to mention sighting such an extraordinary beast.) More than a century later the
French explorer La Salle canoed down the Mississippi. Where De Soto had found
prosperous cities La Salle encountered “a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of
man,” wrote the nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman. Everywhere the French
encountered bison, “grazing in herds on the great prairies which then bordered the river.”
When Indians died, the shaggy creatures vastly extended both their range and numbers,
according to Valerius Geist, a bison researcher at the University of Calgary. “The
post-Columbian abundance of bison,” in his view, was largely due to “Eurasian diseases
that decreased [Indian] hunting.” The massive, thundering herds were pathological,
something that the land had not seen before and was unlikely to see again.
The same may have held true for many other species. “If elk were here in great
numbers all this time, the [archaeological] sites should be chock-full of elk bones,”
Charles Kay, a wildlife ecologist at Utah State, told me. “But the archaeologists will tell
you the elk weren’t there.” In middens around Yellowstone National Park, he said, they
first show up in large numbers about five hundred years ago, the time of the great
epidemics. Until European contact the warm coastline of California was heavily
populated, according to William S. Preston, a geographer at California State Polytechnic
University in San Luis Obispo. After Columbus everything changed. The Indian
population collapsed. Clams and mussels exploded in number; they also grew larger.
Game overran the land. Sir Francis Drake sailed into San Francisco’s harbor in 1579 and
saw a land of plenty. “Infinite was the company of very large and fate Deere,” he
announced. How could he have known that just a century before the shoreline had been
thickly settled and the deer much more scarce?
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HUMANIZED LANDSCAPES, 1491 A.D.
Complex as it is, this map of Indian effects on the environment is incomplete; no
single map could possibly do justice to the subject. The most important omission is fire. I
have highlighted some areas where fires deliberately set by Indians effectively controlled
the landscape, but this practice played an important ecological role throughout the
hemisphere as well, except in wettest Amazonia and northeastern North America.
Similarly, scattered clearing, burning, and earth movement for drainage occurred in all
agricultural areas—the map indicates only where these factors were especially
concentrated. (My depiction of fire-dominated regions in the southern Amazonian
highlands is highly speculative, unlike the rest of this map. Researchers have not
established where such burning occurred—only where it seems likely.)
Not all of these claims have been endorsed enthusiastically. Kay’s work on elk
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has drawn especially heavy fire. Elk are big and Indians may have butchered them where
they fell, meaning that few elk carcasses would appear in middens. Nonetheless,
ecologists and archaeologists increasingly agree that the destruction of Native Americans
also destroyed the ecosystems they managed. Throughout the eastern forest the open,
park-like landscapes observed by the first Europeans quickly filled in. Because they did
not burn the land with the same skill and frequency as its previous occupants, the forests
grew thicker. Left untended, maize fields filled in with weeds, then bushes and trees. My
ancestor Billington’s great-grandchildren may not have realized it, but the impenetrable
sweep of dark forest admired by Thoreau was something that Billington never saw. Later,
of course, Europeans stripped New England almost bare of trees.
When the newcomers moved west, they were preceded by a wave of disease and
then a wave of ecological disturbance. The former crested with fearsome rapidity; the
latter sometimes took more than a century to tamp down, and it was followed by many
aftershocks. “The virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries,” wrote historian Stephen Pyne, “it was invented in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries.” Far from destroying pristine wilderness, that is, Europeans bloodily
created it.
By 1800 the hemisphere was thick with artificial wilderness. If “forest primeval”
means woodland unsullied by the human presence, Denevan has written, there was much
more of it in the nineteenth century than in the seventeenth.
The product of demographic calamity, the newly created wilderness was indeed
beautiful. But it was built on Indian graves and every bit as much a ruin as the temples of
the Maya.
NOVEL SHORES
I once visited Santarém, in the central Amazon, during the river’s annual flood,
when it wells over its banks and creeps inland for miles. Forest paths become canals and
people boat through the trees. Farmers in the floodplain build houses and barns on stilts.
Stir-crazy cattle in the barns stick their heads out the windows and watch pink dolphins
sporting on their doorsteps. Acre-size patches of bobbing vegetation, the famous
“floating islands” of the Amazon, drift by. Ecotourists are taken in motorboats through
the drowned forest. Kids in dories chase after them, trying to sell sacks of incredibly
good fruit.
In the center of Santarém, telephone poles are made of cement, as is usual in
tropical countries that can afford them. (Wooden ones get eaten.) At the edge of town, the
authorities create poles by cutting down trees and propping them wherever needed; in a
display of lethargy, town workers do not lop off branches, strip away bark or vines, or
even remove termite mounds. After maybe a mile they stop using logs and just string the
lines on tree branches. A little further the lines stop altogether. Beyond this the river is
occupied only by hamlets on the bluffs at the water’s edge. The biggest building always
seems to be the Pentecostal or Adventist church. After services whooping kids fill the
red-dirt churchyard and fly kites. Sometimes they attach razor blades to the sides of the
kites and in a war of all against all try to cut each other’s strings. Except for soccer, rural
Brazil’s main sporting event seems to be Attack Kiting.
Between communities water traffic continually darts, hopscotching back and forth
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with the speed of gossip even though many boats are still powered by pushing a long pole
against the bottom. At the river’s edge during flood season are small trees inundated to
the tips of their branches. Thirty feet above them dangles the red fruit of tall kapok trees,
each scarlet bulb reflected perfectly in the still water. People make shortcuts through
narrow tunnels in the vegetation called furos. When I visited an old plantation called
Taperinha, site of an earlier Anna Roosevelt dig, the man at the tiller abruptly turned the
boat straight into the forest. We shot through a furo two thousand feet long and six feet
wide. Some furos have existed for centuries, I was told. There have been water highways
in the forest since before Columbus.
All of this is described as “wilderness” in the tourist brochures. It’s not, if the new
generation of researchers is correct. Indeed, some believe that fewer people may be living
in rural Amazonia now than in 1491. Yet when my boat glided into the furo the forest
shut out the sky like the closing of an umbrella. Within a few hundred yards the human
presence seemed to vanish. I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like
feeling exalted. If what was around me was not wilderness, how should one think of it?
Since the fate of the forest is in our hands, what should be our goal for its future?
European and U.S. environmentalists insist that the forest should never be cut
down or used—it should remain, as far as possible, a land without people. In an
ecological version of therapeutic nihilism, they want to leave the river basin to its own
devices. Brazilians I have encountered are usually less than enthusiastic about this
proposal. Yes, yes, we are in favor of the environment, they say. But we also have many
millions of desperately poor people here. To develop your economy, you leveled your
forests and carpeted the land with strip malls. Why can’t we do the same? If you now
want more forest, why don’t you tear down some of your strip malls and plant trees? Yes,
yes, we are in favor of helping the poor, environmentalists respond. But if you cut down
the tropical forest, you won’t be creating wealth. Instead you will only destroy the soil.
Turning Amazonia into a wasteland will help nobody.
These dialogues of the deaf have occurred so often that the participants can
almost recite their lines by rote. In a way, the words are curiously weightless, for the
environmentalists tend to live in, or at least reflect views from, rich places like London,
Berlin, or San Francisco. And the advocates of development are often from São Paulo,
Rio de Janeiro, or Brasilia, cities that are thousands of miles away from the Amazon and
culturally almost as remote as environmentalists’ cities. “You should see people’s faces
here [in Amazonia] when we tell them we’re from São Paulo,” Eduardo Neves told me.
“It’s like New Yorkers coming to southern Illinois, only worse. ‘My God, aliens have
invaded! Kill them before they infect us all!’”
At the same time, the clash between environmentalist and developer cannot be
dismissed. At stake, after all, is the world’s greatest forest. And similar arguments play
out in a hundred or a thousand other places that need protection. Beneath the entangling
personal motives, the debate is one of the oldest in the Western philosophical tradition,
between nomos and physis. The ancient Greeks saw existence as a contest between nomos
(rationality/order/artifice) and physis (irrationality/chaos/nature). In environmental terms,
Thoreau, who saw the landscape as imbued with an essential wildness that could be
heedlessly destroyed, embodies physis. Physis says, Let Nature be our guide; step out of
the way of the environment, and it will know how to keep itself healthy. Nomos is the
postmodern philosopher who argues that the entire landscape is constructed—that it has
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no essential, innate qualities, but is simply a reflection of chance and human action.
Nomos says that no one ecological state is inherently preferable to any other, but that all
of them are a product of human choices (even the ones with no people, since we will have
made the choice not to go there).
Accepting the magnitude of the Indian impact on the landscape seems to push us
toward the nomos side. In 1983 Cronon laid out the history of the New England
countryside in his landmark book, Changes in the Land. In it he observed that wilderness
as it was commonly understood simply did not exist in the eastern United States, and had
not existed for thousands of years. (A few years later, Denevan referred to the belief in
widespread wilderness as “the pristine myth.”) When Cronon publicized this
no-wilderness scenario in an article for the New York Times, environmentalists and
ecologists attacked him as infected by relativism and postmodern philosophy. A small
academic brouhaha ensued, complete with hundreds of footnotes. It precipitated one of
the only books attacking postmodern philosophy ever written largely by biologists.
Another book, The Great New Wilderness Debate, published in 1998, was edited by two
philosophers who earnestly identified themselves as “Euro-American men…whose
cultural legacy is patriarchal Western civilization in its current postcolonial, globally
hegemonic form.”
It is easy to tweak academics for their earnestly opaque language, as I am doing.
Nonetheless the philosophers’ concerns are understandable. The trees closing over my
head in the Amazon furo made me feel the presence of something beyond myself, an
intuition shared by almost everyone who has walked in the woods alone. That something
seemed to have rules and resistances of its own, ones that did not stem from me. Yet the
claim that the forest was shaped by people does not seem to leave room for anything else,
anything bigger and deeper than humankind.
Understanding that nature is not normative does not mean that anything goes. The
fears come from the mistaken identification of wildness with the forest itself. Instead the
landscape is an arena for the interaction of natural and social forces, a kind of display,
and one that like all displays is not fully under the control of its authors.
Native Americans ran the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the
same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its state in 1491, they
will have to create the world’s largest gardens.
Gardens are fashioned for many purposes with many different tools, but all are
collaborations with natural forces. Rarely do their makers claim to be restoring or
rebuilding anything from the past; and they are never in full control of the results.
Instead, using the best tools they have and all the knowledge that they can gather, they
work to create future environments.
If there is a lesson it is that to think like the original inhabitants of these lands we
should not set our sights on rebuilding an environment from the past but concentrate on
shaping a world to live in for the future.
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268
Coda

The Great Law of Peace
Fleeing the Nazi conquest of Europe, the writer Vladimir Nabokov and his family
took a ship to the United States in the spring of 1940. Although Nabokov was the scion of
a Russian noble family, he detested the class-bound servility ubiquitous in the land of his
birth. He was delighted when the lowly U.S. customs officers on the Manhattan dock
failed to cringe at his aristocratic bearing and pedigree. Indeed, he reported, “when they
opened my suitcase and saw two pairs of boxing gloves, two officers put them on and
began boxing. The third became interested in my collection of butterflies and even
suggested one kind be called ‘captain.’ When the boxing and the conversation about
butterflies finished, the customs men suggested I close the case and go.” Their
straightforward, even brash demeanor, with its implicit assumption that everyone was on
the same social level, enchanted him.
Nabokov was hardly the first emigré to be surprised by the difference between
Americans and Europeans—a cultural divide that Henry James, like many others,
attributed to the former’s “democratic spirit.” As has been widely noted, this spirit has
consequences both positive and negative. The sense that anyone is as good as anyone else
fuels entrepreneurial self-reliance, but also can lead to what outsiders view as political
know-nothingism. For better and worse, though, this spirit is widely identified as one of
the Americas’ great gifts to the world. When rich stockbrokers in London and Paris
proudly retain their working-class accents, when audiences show up at La Scala in track
suits and sneakers, when South Africans and Thais complain that the police don’t read
suspects their rights as they do on Starsky & Hutch reruns, when anti-government
protesters in Beirut sing “We Shall Overcome” in Lebanese accents—all these
raspberries in the face of social and legal authority have a distinctly American tone, no
matter where they take place. To be sure, apostles of freedom have risen in many places.
But an overwhelming number have been inspired by the American example—or, as it
should perhaps be called, the Native American example, for among its fonts is Native
American culture, especially that of the Haudenosaunee.
A loose military alliance among the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida,
Mohawk, and, after about 1720, the Tuscarora, the Haudenosaunee were probably the
greatest indigenous polity north of the Río Grande in the two centuries before Columbus
and definitely the greatest in the two centuries after. The evidence is unclear, but the
ancestors of the Five Nations, neighboring bands of gatherers and hunters, may have
lived in their homeland since the glaciers retreated from the Finger Lakes—the eleven
deep, narrow lakes that lie like cat scratches across central New York State. Some time
around 1000 A.D., the Indian agricultural trinity of maize, beans, and squash appeared in
the area. Taking up agriculture, the Finger Lakes people, by now consolidated into five
main groups, lined the region’s hills with farms. Population rose, as has happened time
and time again when human societies make the transition from foraging to farming. The
burgeoning cultures took to fighting with each other. Because the abduction, injury, or
death of a family member had to be revenged, every violent incident led to a spiral of
brutal, tit-for-tat skirmishes. From this brutal environment a heroic figure emerged:
Deganawidah, the Peacemaker.
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So little is known about Deganawidah’s life that archaeologists disagree about
whether he actually walked the earth or belongs entirely to the realm of legend. Various
traditions provide different accounts of his background, but most say that Deganawidah
was not a member of the Five Nations. He was a shamanic outsider who was born to a
virgin girl in a village far to the north. Abjuring his past, he floated from his home village
in a canoe made from white stone and wandered the Adirondack and Allegheny forests,
then a place of constant violence and, apparently, intermittent cannibalism.
Deganawidah had a message of peace. He couldn’t easily promulgate it, though,
because he had a tragic flaw: a severe speech impediment, perhaps a stutter. Somehow he
connected with Ayenwatha, an Onondaga who was a famous orator. (As “Hiawatha,” this
man became the protagonist of the historically confused epic poem of that name by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.) With Ayenwatha as Deganawidah’s spokesman, the two
men confronted Tododaho, the powerful leader of the Onondaga, a shaman in his own
right, and a warrior-leader who was so deeply locked into the logic of prideful violence
that he regarded the thought of peace as a betrayal. In the ensuing conflict Tododaho
killed Ayenwatha’s three daughters, nearly derailing the quest for peace. Other versions
have the girls killed in a raid by another group. Whatever the circumstances, Ayenwatha
vowed that no parent would ever experience such a loss again and rededicated himself to
spreading Deganawidah’s ideas.
Over the years Deganawidah and Ayenwatha persuaded the Seneca, Cayuga,
Oneida, and Mohawk to form an alliance instead of constantly fighting. Tododaho and
Onondaga continued to refuse. In a parley, Deganawidah took a single arrow and invited
Tododaho to break it, which he did easily. Then he bundled together five arrows and
asked Tododaho to break the lot. He couldn’t. In the same way, Deganawidah
prophesied, the Five Nations, each weak on its own, would fall into darkness unless they
all banded together.
Soon after Deganawidah’s warning, a solar eclipse occurred. The shaken
Tododaho agreed to add the Onondaga to the nascent alliance. But he drove a hard
bargain, demanding that the main Onondaga village, now buried under the present-day
city of Syracuse, New York, become the headquarters for the confederacy. Despite all the
convulsions of history, the Onondaga have kept the council fire burning for
Haudenosaunee to this day. And Tododaho has remained the title for the alliance’s main
speaker.
Deganawidah laid out the new alliance’s rules of operation in the Haudenosaunee
constitution: the Great Law of Peace. When issues came up before the alliance, the
Tododaho would summon the fifty sachems who represented the clans of the Five
Nations. Different nations had different numbers of sachems, but the inequality meant
little because all decisions had to be unanimous; the Five Nations regarded consensus as a
social ideal. As in all consensus-driven bodies, though, members felt intense pressure not
to impede progress with frivolous objections. The heads of clans, who were all female,
chose the sachems, all male. As a rule, sachems were succeeded by their nephews, but the
system was not entirely hereditary—sachems could be impeached if they displeased their
clan, and if their nephews were not deemed fit for office, someone outside the family
could take over.
Striking to the contemporary eye, the 117 codicils of the Great Law were
concerned as much with establishing the limits on the great council’s powers as on
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granting them. Its jurisdiction was strictly limited to relations among the nations and
outside groups; internal affairs were the province of the individual nations. Although the
council negotiated peace treaties, it could not declare war—that was left to the initiative
of the leaders of each of Haudenosaunee’s constituent nations. According to the Great
Law, when the council of sachems was deciding upon “an especially important matter or
a great emergency,” its members had to “submit the matter to the decision of their
people” in a kind of referendum.
In creating such checks on authority, the league was just the most formal
expression of a region-wide tradition. The sachems of Indian groups on the eastern
seaboard were absolute monarchs in theory. In practice, wrote colonial leader Roger
Williams, “they will not conclude of ought…unto which the people are averse.” The
league was predicated, in short, on the consent of the governed, without which the entire
enterprise would collapse. Compared to the despotic societies that were the norm in
Europe and Asia, Haudenosaunee was a libertarian dream.
In the same sense, it was also a feminist dream: the Five Nations were largely
governed internally by the female clan heads, and the Great Law explicitly ordered
council members to heed “the warnings of your women relatives.” Failure to do so would
lead to their removal. The equality granted to women was not the kind envisioned by
contemporary Western feminists—men and women were not treated as equivalent.
Rather, the sexes were assigned to two separate social domains, neither subordinate to the
other. No woman could be a war chief; no man could lead a clan. Anthropologists debate
the extent of women’s clout under this “separate-but-equal” arrangement, but according
to University of Toledo historian Barbara Mann, author of Iroquoian Women: The
Gantowisas (2004), the female-led clan councils set the agenda of the League—“men
could not consider a matter not sent to them by the women.” Women, who held title to all
the land and its produce, could vote down decisions by the male leaders of the League
and demand that an issue be reconsidered. Under this regime women were so much better
off than their counterparts in Europe that nineteenth-century U.S. feminists like Lucretia
Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, all of whom lived in
Haudenosaunee country, drew inspiration from their lot.
According to Haudenosaunee tradition, the alliance was founded centuries before
Europeans arrived. Non-Indian researchers long treated this claim to antiquity with
skepticism. The league, in their view, was inherently fragile and fissiparous; if it had
been founded a thousand years ago, it would have broken up well before the Pilgrims.
And there was little archaeological evidence that the league had existed for many
centuries. But both traditional lore and contemporary astronomical calculations suggest
that Haudenosaunee dates back to between 1090 and 1150 A.D. The former date was
calculated by Seneca historian Paula Underwood, who based her estimate on the tally of
generations in oral records. The latter came from historian Mann and her Toledo
colleague, astronomer Jerry Fields. The Five Nations recorded the succession of council
members with a combination of pegs and carved images on long wooden cylinders called
Condolence Canes. (Iroquois pictographs could convey sophisticated ideas, but
functioned more as a mnemonic aid than a true writing system. The symbols were not
conventionalized—that is, one person could not easily read a document composed by
another.) According to Mohawk historian Jake Swamp, 145 Tododahos spoke for the
league between its founding and 1995, when Mann and Fields made their calculation.
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With this figure in hand, Mann and Fields calculated the average tenure of more than
three hundred other lifetime appointments, including popes, European kings and queens,
and U.S. Supreme Court justices. Multiplying the average by the number of Tododahos,
the two researchers estimated that the alliance was probably founded in the middle of the
twelfth century. To check this estimate, Mann and Fields turned to astronomical tables.
Before 1600, the last total solar eclipse observable in upstate New York occurred on
August 31, 1142. If Mann and Fields are correct, this was the date on which Tododaho
accepted the alliance. The Haudenosaunee thus would have the second oldest
continuously existing representative parliaments on earth. Only Iceland’s Althing,
founded in 930 A.D., is older.
Scholars debate these estimates, but nobody disputes that the Haudenosaunee
exemplified the formidable tradition of limited government and personal autonomy
shared by many cultures north of the Río Grande. To some extent, this freedom simply
reflected North American Indians’ relatively recent adoption of agriculture. Early
farming villages worldwide were much less authoritarian places than later societies. But
the Indians of the eastern seaboard institutionalized their liberty to an unusual extent—the
Haudenosaunee especially, but many others, too. (“Their whole constitution breathes
nothing but liberty,” said colonist James Adair of the Ani Yun Wiya [Cherokee].)
Important historically, these were the free people encountered by France and
Britain—personifications of democratic self-government so vivid that some historians
and activists have argued that the Great Law of Peace directly inspired the U.S.
Constitution.
Taken literally, this assertion seems implausible. With its grant of authority to the
federal government to supersede state law, its dependence on rule by the majority rather
than consensus, its bicameral legislature (members of one branch being simultaneously
elected), and its denial of suffrage to women, slaves, and the unpropertied, the
Constitution as originally enacted was sharply different from the Great Law. In addition,
the Constitution’s emphasis on protecting private property runs contrary to
Haudenosaunee traditions of communal ownership. But in a larger sense, the claim is
correct. The framers of the Constitution, like most colonists in what would become the
United States, were pervaded by Indian ideals and images of liberty.
In the first two centuries of colonization, the border between natives and
newcomers was porous, almost nonexistent. The two societies mingled in a way that is
difficult to imagine now; Europeans had close-up views of their indigenous neighbors. In
a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aging John Adams recalled the Massachusetts of his
youth as a multiracial society. “Aaron Pomham the Priest and Moses Pomham the King
of the Punkapaug and Neponsit Tribes were frequent Visitors at my Father’s House,” he
wrote nostalgically. “There was a numerous Family in this Town [Quincy,
Massachusetts, where Adams grew up], whose Wigwam was within a Mile of this
House.” They frequently visited Adams, “and I in my boyish Rambles used to call at their
Wigwam, where I never failed to be treated with Whortle Berries, Blackberries,
Strawberries or Apples, Plumbs, Peaches, etc.” Benjamin Franklin was equally familiar
with Native American life; as a diplomat, he negotiated with the Haudenosaunee in 1753.
Among his closest friends was Conrad Weiser, an adopted Mohawk, and the Indians’
unofficial host at the talks. And one of the mainstays of Franklin’s printing business was
the publication of Indian treaties, then viewed as critical state documents.
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As Franklin and many others noted, Indian life—not only among the
Haudenosaunee, but throughout the Northeast—was characterized by a level of personal
autonomy unknown in Europe. Franklin’s ancestors may have emigrated from Europe to
escape oppressive rules, but colonial societies were still vastly more coercive and
class-ridden than indigenous villages. “Every man is free,” the frontiersman Robert
Rogers told a disbelieving British audience, referring to Indian villages. In these places,
he said, no other person, white or Indian, sachem or slave, “has any right to deprive
[anyone] of his freedom.” As for the Haudenosaunee, colonial administrator Cadwallader
Colden declared in 1749, they had “such absolute Notions of Liberty, that they allow of
no Kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their
Territories.” (Colden, who later became vice governor of New York, was an adoptee of
the Mohawks.)
Rogers and Colden admired these Indians, but not every European did. “The
Savage does not know what it is to obey,” complained the French explorer Nicolas Perrot
in the 1670s. Indians “think every one ought to be left to his own Opinion, without being
thwarted,” the Jesuit Louis Hennepin wrote twenty years later. The Indians, he grumbled,
“believe what they please and no more”—a practice dangerous, in Hennepin’s view, to a
well-ordered society. “There is nothing so difficult to control as the tribes of America,”
another Jesuit unhappily observed. “All these barbarians have the law of wild
asses—they are born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is
meant by bridle and bit.”
Indian insistence on personal liberty was accompanied by an equal insistence on
social equality. Northeastern Indians were appalled by the European propensity to divide
themselves into social classes, with those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy compelled
to defer to those on the upper. The French adventurer Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce,
Baron of Lahontan, lived in French Canada between 1683 and 1694 and frequently
visited the Huron. When the baron expatiated upon the superior practices of Europe, the
Indians were baffled. The Huron, he reported in an account of his American years, could
not understand why
one Man should have more than another, and that the Rich should have more
Respect than the Poor…. They brand us for Slaves, and call us miserable Souls, whose
Life is not worth having, alleging, That we degrade ourselves in subjecting our selves to
one Man [a king] who possesses the whole Power, and is bound by no Law but his own
Will…. [Individual Indians] value themselves above anything that you can imagine, and
this is the reason they always give for’t, That one’s as much Master as another, and since
Men are all made of the same Clay there should be no Distinction or Superiority among
them. [Emphasis in original.]
The essayist Montaigne had noted the same antiauthoritarian attitudes a century
earlier. Indians who visited France, he wrote, “noticed among us some men gorged to the
full with things of every sort while their other halves were beggars at their doors,
emaciated with hunger and poverty. They found it strange that these poverty-stricken
halves should suffer [that is, tolerate] such injustice, and that they did not take the others
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y the throat or set fire to their houses.”
I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather
have been a typical citizen of Europe or the Haudenosaunee in 1491. None was delighted
by the question, because it asked them to judge the past by the standards of today—a
fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists. But every one of the seven chose
the Indians. Some early colonists gave the same answer. The leaders of Jamestown tried
to persuade Indians to transform themselves into Europeans. Embarrassingly, almost all
of the traffic was the other way—scores of English joined the locals despite promises of
dire punishment. The same thing happened in New England. Puritan leaders were
horrified when some members of a rival English settlement began living with the
Massachusett Indians. My ancestor’s desire to join them led to trumped-up murder
charges for which he was executed—or, anyway, that’s what my grandfather told me.
When an Indian Child has been brought up among us [Franklin lamented in
1753], taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his
relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to
return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the
Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with
all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short
time they become disgusted with our manner of life…and take the first good Opportunity
of escaping again into the Woods, when there is no reclaiming them.
Influenced by their proximity to Indians—by being around living, breathing role
models of human liberty—European colonists adopted their insubordinate attitudes,
which “troubled the power elite of France,” the historian Cornelius J. Jaenen observed.
Baron d’Arce was an example, despite his noble title; as the passage he italicized
suggests, his account highlighted Indian freedoms as an incitement toward rebellion. In
Voltaire’s Candide, the eponymous hero is saved from death at the hands of an imaginary
group of Indians only when they discover that he is not, as they think, a priest; the
author’s sympathy with the anticlerical, antiauthoritarian views of Indians he called
“Oreillons” is obvious. Both the clergy and Louis XIV, the king whom Baron d’Arce was
goading, tried to suppress these dangerous ideas by instructing French officials to force a
French education upon the Indians, complete with lessons in deferring to their social
betters. The attempts, Jaenen reported, were “everywhere unsuccessful.”
In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous villages into competitors
for colonists’ allegiance. Colonial societies could not become too oppressive, because
their members—surrounded by examples of free life—always had the option to vote with
their feet. It is likely that the first British villages in North America, thousands of miles
from the House of Lords, would have lost some of the brutally graded social hierarchy
that characterized European life. But it is also clear that they were infused by the
democratic, informal brashness of Native American culture. That spirit alarmed and
discomfited many Europeans, toff and peasant alike. But it is also clear that many others
found it a deeply attractive vision of human possibility.
Historians have been puzzlingly reluctant to acknowledge this contribution to the
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end of tyranny worldwide. Think of I. Bernard Cohen claiming that Enlightenment
philosophers derived their ideas of freedom from Newtonian physics, when a plain
reading of their texts shows that Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Thomas Paine took many
of their illustrations of liberty from native examples. So did the Boston colonists who
held their anti-British Tea Party dressed as “Mohawks.” When others took up European
intellectuals’ books and histories, images of Indian freedom exerted an impact far
removed in time and space from the sixteenth-century Northeast. For much the same
reason as their confreres in Boston, protesters in South Korea, China, and Ukraine wore
“Native American” makeup in, respectively, the 1980s, 1990s, and the first years of this
century.
So accepted now around the world is the idea of the implicit equality and liberty
of all people that it is hard to grasp what a profound change in human society it
represented. But it is only a little exaggeration to claim that everywhere that liberty is
cherished—Britain to Bangladesh, Sweden to Soweto—people are children of the
Haudenosaunee and their neighbors. Imagine—here let me now address non-Indian
readers—somehow meeting a member of the Haudenosaunee from 1491. Is it too much
to speculate that beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and
bedizened robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself, at least in
certain respects, than your own ancestors?
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When I set out to write 1491, my hope was that it would introduce readers to a
subject that I found fascinating. For this reason I wanted to have a fuller bibliography
than is usual in popular works—I wished to point people to the original sources, so that
readers who were interested could find out more.
Most of the researchers whose work I covered have been very kind about 1491,
but I knew from the beginning that few would be completely satisfied. Any book so
broad in scope risks getting the details wrong; besides, it was written by a journalist, and
journalists and scholars notoriously have different interests and styles.
As it turned out, the section that drew the greatest criticism was the coda. If I
could write the book over again, I would go in more detail there, both to explain my point
better and because the section exemplifies, to my mind, why the book’s subtitle is
justified, even though (as some archaeologically sophisticated readers have complained)
some of the “new revelations” chronicled in 1491 occurred fifty years ago. More than
fifty, in fact—some of the demographic estimates I describe in the first section date to the
1940s.
The reason for the subtitle is that for the most part these revelations—the great
antiquity, size, and sophistication of Indian societies—are new to the public. The
question, implicit in the previous, is the cause of the gap. Why don’t intelligent
non-specialists, the sort of people who know a bit about stem cells and read
contemporary literature, already know something about how researchers think of the
Americas before Columbus? Another way of putting the question would be to ask: Why
isn’t this material already in high-school textbooks?
In the past one could have simply pointed to institutional racism. Today, though,
when textbooks are routinely criticized for overemphasizing the stories of minorities and
women, it seems hard to imagine that ethnocentrism accounts for the relative lack of
attention paid to the indigenous world. To my mind, the culprit nowadays is more likely
to be disciplinary boundaries. Except possibly for China and Japan, non-Western
societies have generally been regarded as the province of anthropology and archaeology.
As a result, the historians who write school textbooks have all too often waved their
hands at the first fifteen or twenty thousand years of American history in an obligatory
first chapter and then moved quickly into fields they find more congenial. Even today, a
surprising number of historians remain unaware of the discoveries and methodologies of
their colleagues in anthropology, archaeology, geography, and cultural studies. Similarly,
many anthropologists know little of what has been called “ethnohistory.” While I was
giving a presentation about this book at a large U.S. university, a man in the audience,
identifying himself as an American historian, asked me how he could learn more about
this material. I am not mocking him for asking—I was delighted that he wanted to know
the answer. But at the same time I was amazed: He was in an audience full of professors
and graduate students who could have answered his every question. Repeated incidents of
this sort have convinced me that his lack of knowledge was not exceptional.
Change is occurring, but there is still no account, to cite but one example, of the
conquest of Mexico that masters the evidence in both Spanish and Nahuatl to portray the
two sides in equal depth. The lack is amazing, given that the conquest is one of the most
pivotal moments in recent history—it delivered the vast wealth of the Americas to
Europe, and that newly acquired wealth played a principal role in Europe’s rise to
dominance.
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To be sure, a number of historians have worked to portray the indigenous side in
post-contact history. (One U.S. example is Alan Gallay’s The Indian Slave Trade, a
remarkable history of the pre-Revolutionary Southeast that appeared in 2003; another is
Alan Taylor’s The Divided Ground, a study of British-Haudenosaunee relations in the
Revolutionary era, from 2006.) But even many of these writers have shied away from
awarding Indians the status of full participants—by asking, for example, how native
societies influenced the colonial societies that mingled with them.
This criticism applies primarily to historians of North America. South of the Rio
Grande, the indigenous influence on colonial and post-colonial society has been
celebrated for decades. (This celebration, which has been convenient for nationalistic
reasons, has not always led to teaching Latin American children accurately about those
native societies, or to treating contemporary indigenous people fairly.) The native imprint
is obvious in the arts; the art and architecture produced by the synthesis of Indian and
European styles in colonial Mesoamerica, the Clark University art historian Gauvin
Alexander Bailey argued in a 2005 monograph, is “one of humanity’s greatest and most
pluralistic achievements.” But this synthesis is apparent in many other aspects of the
culture, too, as would be expected in a place where three-quarters of the population
claims some Indian descent.
North of the Rio Grande the possibility of such influences are often ignored when
not denied. To some extent this is understandable. After all, Indians were and are less
numerous in the North. And most native societies in what is now the United States and
Canada did not have written languages, monumental public architecture, or the
wide-ranging aesthetic traditions of their neighbors to the south. Yet European colonists
mingled with intact native cultures for some three centuries. Colonist Susanna Johnson
described eighteenth-century New Hampshire, for example, as “such a mix…of savages
and settlers, without established laws to govern them, that the state of society cannot
easily be described.” During those centuries, Indians were greatly influenced—culturally,
technologically, intellectually—by colonists. It seems implausible that the exchange
could have been entirely one-way—that the natives have had little or no long-lasting
impact on the newcomers. At the least the claim is something to be demonstrated rather
than assumed.
Scholars have acknowledged such borrowings as moccasins, maize, and military
tactics, such as the Indian-style guerrilla skirmishes with which the rebellious colonists
bedeviled British soldiers. (“In this country,” Gen. John Forbes argued in 1758, “wee
must comply and learn the Art of Warr, from Enemy Indians.”) With such adaptive
changes, as the historian James Axtell has called them, Europeans employed Indian
technology and tactics to achieve their goals. But they did not change how they viewed
themselves or the world. According to an influential essay Axtell published in 1981, the
most important role Indians played in the evolution of the United States was as “military
foes and cultural foes”—to be the “otherness” that colonists reacted against. “The whole
colonial experience of trying to solve a related series of ‘Indian problems’ had much to
do with giving the colonists an identity indissolubly linked to America,” he wrote.
Collectively recoiling from the native population of the Americas, Europeans learned
how to become a new version of themselves.
Here, though, most historians have stopped. They have seen the Algonkian- and
Iroquoian-speaking societies they encountered in the Northeast as too different from
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British societies to have exerted lasting changes on them. How could these hierarchical,
acquisitive, market-oriented, monotheistic, ethnocentric newcomers have absorbed ideas
and customs from the egalitarian, reciprocal, noncapitalistic, pantheistic, ethnocentric
natives? My suggestion that the Haudenosaunee could have had an impact on the
American character is “naïve,” according to Alan Taylor, because it “minimizes the
cultural divide separating consensual natives from coercive colonists.” Perhaps so, but
then skeptics must explain how the cultural divide between Indians and Spaniards, who
did deeply influence each other, could have been so much smaller.
(The historian Francis Jennings has wondered how “Iroquois propagandists,” as
he calls them, can cite Benjamin Franklin’s words about Indians, as I did, given his
oft-expressed “contempt for ‘ignorant Savages.’…But people believe what they want to
believe in the face of logic and evidence.” The argument is baffling; it is like claiming
that African-Americans had no impact on European-American culture, because the latter
was racist and systematically oppressed the former.)
To Europeans, Indians were living demonstrations of wholly novel ways of being
human—exemplary cases that were mulled over, though rarely understood completely,
by countless Europeans. Colonists and stay-at-homes, intellectuals and commoners, all
struggled to understand, according to the sociologist-historian Denys Delâge, of Laval
University, in Québec, “the very existence of these relatively egalitarian societies, so
different in their structure and social relationships than those of Europe.” Montaigne,
Rousseau, Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, Franklin, and Thomas Paine were among the
writers who mulled over the differences between native and European ways of life; some
pondered Indian criticism of European societies. The result, Delâge explained, was to
promote a new attitude of “cultural relativism” that in turn fed Enlightenment era debates
“about the republican form of government, the rearing of children, and the ideals of
freedom, equality, brotherhood, and the right to happiness.”
Cultural influence is difficult to pin down in documents and concrete actions.
Nevertheless it exists. In 1630 John Winthrop led what was then the largest party of
would-be colonists from Britain—some seven hundred people—to Massachusetts, where
they founded the city of Boston. As the expedition was under way, the deeply religious
Winthrop explained his vision of what the new colony should become: “a citty upon a
hill.” The city would be ruled by the principles of the Pilgrim’s God. Among these
principles: the Supreme Deity loves each person equally, but He did not intend them to
play equal roles in society:
GOD ALMIGHTY in his most holy and wise providence, hath soe disposed of the
condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poore, some high and
eminent in power and dignitie; others mean and in submission.
Winthrop’s ideal community, that is, was not a place of equal opportunity, nor a
place where social distinctions were erased; the “mean” circumstances of the poor were
“in all times” part of God’s plan, and could not be greatly changed (if poor people got too
far behind, the rich were supposed to help them). The social ideal was responsible
adherence to religiously inspired authority, not democratic self-rule.
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The reality turned out to be different. Instead of creating Winthrop’s vision of an
ordered society, the Pilgrims actually invented the raucous, ultra-democratic New
England town meeting—a system of governance, the Dartmouth historian Colin
Calloway observes, that “displays more attributes of Algonkian government by consensus
than of Puritan government by the divinely ordained.” To me, it seems unlikely that the
surrounding Indian example had nothing to do with the change.
Accepting that indigenous societies influenced American culture opens up
fascinating new questions. To begin with, it is possible that native societies could also
have exercised a malign influence (this is why the subject is not necessarily “pious” or
“romantic primitivism,” as the Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has
complained). Look to the Southeast, where, as Taylor has noted, “colonial societies
sustained a slave system more oppressive than anything practiced in Europe” and “the
slave-owners relied on Indians to catch runaways.” There, too, the native groups,
descended from Mississippian societies, were far more hierarchical and autocratically
ruled than the Algonkian- and Iroquoian-speaking groups in the Northeast. As Gallay has
documented, indigenous societies cooperated fully with the slave-trading system, sending
war captives to colonists for sale overseas. In the Northeast, by contrast, the Wendat
(Huron) and Haudenosaunee either killed or, more common, adopted captives;
involuntary servitude, though it occurred, was strikingly rarer.
On the map, the division line between slave and non-slave societies occurs in
Virginia, broadly anticipating the Mason-Dixon line that later split slave states from free.
The repeated pattern doubtless has to do with geography—southeastern climate and soil
favor plantation crops like tobacco and cotton. And southern colonists’ preference for
slavery presumably reflected their different ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds. But
can one readily dismiss the different Indian societies who lived in these places? And if
not, to what extent are contemporary American conflicts over race the playing out, at
least in part, of a cultural divide that came into being hundreds of years before
Columbus?
A few personal remarks: After the first publication of this book, a number of
readers and researchers contacted me with observations and criticisms, many of which
made their way into this updated and corrected edition. Some book reviewers, too, drew
my attention to errors, which I have tried to fix. For this help, I thank T. Chad Amos,
David B. Bieler, Alfred W. Crosby, Todd Follansbee, Daniel W. Gade, Berl Golomb,
Bob Hart, Bruce Johansen, Jeff Kellem, Elias Levy, Barbara Mann, William H. McNeill,
Daniel N. Paul, Victor Sanchez, Jeffrey Shallit, Ted Slusarczyk, Michael M. Smith, Rev.
Steve Thom, Rick Uyesugi, and Ronald Wright. I am sure I have left out some
names—not until relatively late in the process did I begin keeping records. A couple of
people read all or part of the published book a second time after having read it a first time
in manuscript. One of these gluttons for punishment, Frances Karttunen, gave my
Nahuatl orthography a second critique (it is still imperfect, but I hope improved); I also
profited from her other insights. William Denevan, too, went through everything again
with blue pencil in hand. I am indebted to both. A number of bloggers weighed in, for
which my especial thanks to James Hannam (Venerable Bede), Chris Price (Layman) and
Laura Gjovaag (Tegan).
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My gratitude to the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers, which, under
the direction of Antoinette WinklerPrins and Narciso Barrera Bassols, organized a special
panel on 1491 at their annual congress in Michoacán, Mexico. On the panel were William
Doolittle, Suzanna Hecht, George Lovell, Billie Lee Turner, William I. Woods, and again
William Denevan. Through the auspices of Jerry Dobson (to whom my thanks) the
proceedings will be published in the Geographical Review. Finally, I am saddened to
note that just before this book appeared the archaeologist Jim Petersen, whom I had come
to consider a friend, was murdered during a stupid robbery in the Amazon. I hope that in
a small way this book reflects the infectious delight he took in unveiling the human story,
and in explaining his discoveries—and those of his colleagues—to anyone who wanted to
learn.
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Loaded Words
Anyone who attempts to write or even speak about the original inhabitants of the
Americas quickly runs into terminological quicksand. And the attempt to extricate writer
and reader by being logical and sensitive often ends with both parties sucked deeper into
the mire. The difficulties fall into two broad categories: names for individual groups of
Indians, and names for social categories used to classify those groups. Most well known
among the former is “Indian,” a term so long recognized as absurd that in the 1960s and
1970s social scientists moved to change it to “Native American” or, sometimes,
“Amerindian.”
The change was well meaning, but not entirely successful. On a literal level, the
replacement name is as problematic as the original. “Native American” is intended to
refer to the peoples who inhabited the Americas before Columbus arrived and their
descendants today. Literally, though, it means something else: as the activist Russell
Means has complained, “Anyone born in the western hemisphere is a Native American.”
Worse, the term introduces an entirely new set of confusions. “Indian” does not refer to
the Inuit, Aleut, and other peoples of the far north, whose cultures, languages, and even
physical appearance are so different from their neighbors to the south that researchers
generally argue they must have come to the Americas in a separate, much later wave of
migration (though still many centuries ahead of Columbus). But all of them are Native
Americans, which eliminates a distinction found useful by both scholars and indigenous
peoples themselves.
In conversation, every native person whom I have met (I think without exception)
has used “Indian” rather than “Native American.” One day I said “Native American”
when speaking to a Bolivian graduate student of indigenous descent. She shook her head
dismissively at the phrase. “Aquí somos indios,” she explained. “Los ‘americanos
nativos’ viven solamente en los Estados Unidos.” We are Indians here. “Native
Americans” live only in the United States. “I abhor the term Native American,” Means
declared in 1998. Matching his actions to his words, Means had joined and become
prominent in an indigenous-rights group called the American Indian Movement. “We
were enslaved as American Indians,” he wrote, “we were colonized as American Indians,
and we will gain our freedom as American Indians, and then we will call ourselves any
damn thing we choose.” (At the same time, the common British usage of “Red Indian” to
distinguish American natives from “East Indians” is unwelcome.)
Historically speaking, both “Indian” and “Native American” are remote from the
way America’s first peoples thought about themselves. Much as the inhabitants of the
tenth-century Carolingian Empire did not describe themselves as “Europeans,” a name
coined in the seventeenth century, the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere in that
same era did not think in terms of “Indians,” “Native Americans,” or any other collective
hemispheric entity. Instead they regarded themselves as belonging to their immediate
group—the Patuxet village in the Wampanoag confederation, for instance.
To a considerable extent, the same holds true today. When Russell Thornton, the
UCLA anthropologist, kindly sent me some copies of his work, he enclosed his
curriculum vitae, which identified him as a “registered member of the Cherokee Nation,”
not as an Indian, Native American, Amerindian, or indigenous person. When I mentioned
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this to Thornton, he responded that only one experience united the diverse peoples of the
Americas: being flattened by European incursions. “‘Indians’ or ‘Native Americans’ as a
category both owe their existence to Europe,” he said.
For all these reasons, this book uses “Indian” and “Native American”
interchangeably, with the latter serving mainly to avoid repetition.
Note, though, that I use these terms as cultural and geographical categories, not
racial ones. “Indian” is the Western Hemisphere’s equivalent to “European,” not to
“white” or “Caucasian.” Racial categories are inevitably problematic, because they are
ostensibly biological—that is, they are supposed to be based on heritable physical
characteristics like skin color—but in fact are heavily cultural, as demonstrated by the
infamous “one drop” rule in the nineteenth-century southern United States, which
proclaimed that men and women were Negroes, even when they could not be
distinguished by whites from appearance, if any of their ancestors, no matter how remote,
were African. Avoiding such inconsistency and ambiguity is easier if one eschews
categorizing by race, which I have tried to do, except for the occasional rhetorical
flourish.
In referring to particular groups of Indians—the Wampanoag or the Maya—I use
a simple rule of thumb: I try to call groups by the name preferred by their members. This
approach, which seems only courteous, is sometimes attacked as condescending. After
all, the argument runs, people in the United States use the English labels “French” and
“German” rather than français and Deutsch. To insist on using “proper” names for
Indians is thus to place them in a special category of fragility. But this objection is not
well thought out. Although English-speakers do speak of “Germans” rather than
Deutscher, “French people” rather than les français, they tend to avoid insulting terms
like “Kraut” and “Frog.” Many common names for Indian groups are equally insulting, or
descended from such insults. Unsurprisingly, they are slowly being changed.
My “simple” rule of thumb to call people by the name they prefer is more
complex than it may seem. The far north, for example, is home to a constellation of
related societies generally known as “Eskimo,” but in the 1980s this term was replaced
by “Inuit” in Canada, where most of these groups live, after complaints that “Eskimo”
came from a pejorative term in Algonquian language that meant “eater of raw flesh.”
Why this would be bothersome seems unclear, because raw meat is a preferred part of
northerners’ diet, much as sushi is favored by the Japanese. In any case, linguists believe
that “Eskimo” actually stems from the Algonquian terms for “snowshoe netter” or
“people who speak a different language,” neither of which seems especially derogatory.
Worse for contemporary purposes, “Inuit” is also the name of a specific subgroup of
Arctic societies, to which such northern indigenous peoples as the Aleutiiq in the
Aleutian Islands and Innu in Labrador do not belong. If that weren’t enough, the Inupiat
in Alaska, who belong to the Inuit subgroup but speak a different language than their
cousins in Canada, have generally resisted the term “Inuit” in favor of “Alaska Native”
or, sometimes, “Eskimo.”
An additional source of confusion occurs when indigenous languages have
different romanization schemes. Runa Simi (Quechua), the group of languages spoken in
the former Inka empire, has several; I have tried to follow the one promulgated by the
Peruvian Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua in 1995, which seems to be slowly
gaining popularity. The choice is more difficult for the three dozen languages grouped as
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“Maya.” As an example, the name of the ruler slain at the beginning of Chapter 8 has
been rendered as, among other things, Toh-Chak-Ich’ak, Chak Toh Ich’ak, and Chak Tok
Ich’aak; his title, “lord,” has been romanized as ahau, ahaw, ajau, ajaw, and even axaw.
In 1989 the Ministry of Culture and Sports in Guatemala published a standardized
orthography for Maya. Unfortunately, Mexico has a different one. Indeed, it has several.
Various Mexican agencies have issued putatively official orthographies, most based on
Alfredo Barrera Vásquez’s classic Diccionario Maya Cordemex, all intended to “help
save these languages from extinction.” In this book, I throw up my hands and spell Maya
names as they appear in the most authoritative recent source I have come across:
Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens, by the epigraphers Simon Martin and Nikolai
Grube. (None of this is to say that I have not made mistakes or sometimes failed to follow
my own rules. I’m sure I have done exactly that, though I tried not to.)
The second type of problem, that of categorization, is equally knotty. Take the
word “civilization”—“a saltpeter of a word, often triggering explosive arguments,”
Alfred Crosby has written. The arguments occur when cultures are deemed not to be
civilizations; are they therefore “uncivilized”? Archaeologists and anthropologists have
proposed dozens of definitions and argue about whether the existence of a written
language is essential. If it is, there may have been no Indian civilizations outside
Mesoamerica. Yet other parts of the Americas are filled with ruins (Tiwanaku, Marajó,
Cahokia) that would be described as the product of a civilization if they were anywhere
else in the world. The distinction seems to me unhelpful. Like Crosby, I use the word
“not in moral comment, but simply in reference to peoples settled in cities, villages,
hamlets, and to the kinds of political, economic, social, and military structures associated
with such populations.”
Sometimes researchers attempt to avoid the whole debate by substituting the term
“complex society.” Not much is gained thereby, because it implies that hunters and
gatherers have simple lives. A century ago, anthropologist Franz Boas demonstrated the
contrary as he struggled to fathom the mind-bogglingly elaborate patterns of Northwest
Coast Indian life. Still, the term has some resonance. As societies grow larger, their
members become more encrusted by manufactured goods, both standardized for the mass
consumer and custom-made for the elite. Along with this growth comes a growth in the
size and variety of the technological infrastructure. It is in this material sense that I use
the words “complex” and “sophisticated.”
In this book I tend to marshal terms like “king” and “nation” rather than “chief”
and “tribe.” Supposedly the latter refer mainly to kin-based societies whereas the former
are for bigger societies based on a shared group identity. In practice, though, “chief” and
“tribe” have historically been used to refer disparagingly to frontier cultures conquered
by larger societies. In textbooks the Roman emperors, heroic custodians of Greco-Roman
civilization, are always fighting off the “barbarian chiefs” of the “Germanic tribes.” But
these “tribes” had rulers who lived in big palaces, held sway over sizable domains, and
had to abide by written codes of law. The Burgundian “tribe” even conquered Rome and
set up its own puppet Roman emperor in the fifth century. (He was killed by another
“tribe,” which installed its own emperor.)
Maps of fifth- and sixth-century Europe usually depict the “Celtic kingdoms,”
“Kingdom of the Lombards,” and so on, their borders marked by the solid lines we
associate with national frontiers. But entities of equal or greater size and technological
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sophistication in the Western Hemisphere are routinely called “chiefdoms” and “tribes,”
implying they are somehow different and of smaller scale. And fuzzy lines mark their
borders, as if to indicate the looseness with which they were organized and defined.
“‘Tribe’ and ‘chiefdom’ are not neutral scientific terms,” archaeologist Alice Beck Kehoe
has declared. “They are politically loaded.” I have mostly avoided them.
In general, I have tried to use the terms that historians of Europe or Asia would
use to describe social and political entities of similar size and complexity. This approach
risks obliterating the real differences between, to cite one example, the court in Qosqo
and the court in Madrid. But it supports one of the larger aims of this book: to explain in
lay terms researchers’ increasing recognition that the Western Hemisphere played a role
in the human story just as interesting and important as that of the Eastern Hemisphere.
A final note: throughout the text, I use the European terminology of B.C. and
A.D. Many researchers object to them as ethnically bound. In truth, it is a little odd to be
talking about “years before Christ” in reference to people whose cultural traditions have
nothing to do with Christianity. But no plausible substitutes are available. Some
historians use B.C.E. to mean “before the Common era,” but because the Common Era
calendar is just a renamed Christian calendar that still places past events in reference to
Christianity, the main objection. One could switch to a neutral calendar, like the Julian
calendar used by astronomers (the latter at least doesn’t get tripped up by zero—it is the
first European calendar as sophisticated as the Mesoamerican Long Count). This doesn’t
seem useful; to discharge their informational content, readers will have to translate Julian
dates back into what they know, the familiar A.D. and B.C. It seems only kind to save
them the bother.
Talking Knots
All known written accounts of the Inka were set down after the conquest, most by
Spaniards who had, of course, never experienced the empire in its heyday. Because many
of the chroniclers tried to do their job conscientiously, most scholars use their reports,
despite their deficiencies, as I do in this book. For obvious reasons historians of the Inka
have never liked being forced to rely exclusively on post-conquest, non-native written
sources, but there seemed to be no avoiding it.
Recently, though, some researchers have come to believe that the Inka did have a
written language—indeed, that Inka texts are displayed in museums around the world, but
that they have generally not been recognized as such. Here I am referring to the bunches
of knotted strings known as khipu (or quipu, as the term is often spelled). Among the
most fascinating artifacts of Tawantinsuyu, they consist of a primary cord, usually a third
to a half an inch in diameter, from which dangle thinner “pendant” strings—typically
more than a hundred, but on occasion as many as 1,500. The pendant strings, which
sometimes have subsidiary strings attached, bear clusters of knots, each tied in one of
three ways. The result, in the dry summary of George Gheverghese Joseph, a University
of Manchester mathematics historian, “resembles a mop that has seen better days.”
According to colonial accounts, khipukamayuq—“knot keepers,” in Ruma
Suni—parsed the knots both by inspecting them visually and by running their fingers
along them, Braille-style, sometimes accompanying this by manipulating black and white
stones. For example, to assemble a history of the Inka empire the Spanish governor
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Cristóbal Vaca de Castro summoned khipukamayuq to “read” the strings in 1542. Spanish
scribes recorded their testimony but did not preserve the khipu; indeed, they may have
destroyed them. Later the Spanish became so infuriated when khipu records contradicted
their version of events that in 1583 they ordered that all the knotted strings in Peru be
burned as idolatrous objects. Only about six hundred escaped the flames.
All known writing systems employ instruments to paint or inscribe on flat
surfaces. Khipu, by contrast, are three-dimensional arrays of knots. Although Spanish
chronicles repeatedly describe khipukamayuq consulting their khipu, most researchers
could not imagine that such strange-looking devices could actually be written records.
Instead they speculated that khipu must be mnemonic devices—personalized
memorization aids, like rosaries—or, at most, textile abacuses. The latter view gained
support in 1923, when science historian L. Leland Locke proved that the pattern of knots
in most khipu recorded the results of numerical calculations—the knotted strings were
accounting devices. Khipu were hierarchical, decimal arrays, Locke said, with the knots
used to record 1s on the lowest level of each string, those for the 10s on the next, and so
on. “The mystery has been dispelled,” archaeologist Charles W. Mead exulted, “and we
now know the quipu for just what it was in prehistoric times…simply an instrument for
recording numbers.”
Based on such evaluations, most Andeanists viewed the Inka as the only major
civilization ever to come into existence without a written language. “The Inka had no
writing,” Brian Fagan, an archaeologist at the University of California in Santa Barbara,
wrote in Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade, his 1991 survey of Native American
cultures. “The quipu was purely a way of storing precise information, a pre-Columbian
computer memory, if you will.”
But even as Fagan was writing, researchers were coming to doubt this conclusion.
The problem was that Locke’s rules only decoded about 80 percent of khipu—the
remainder were incomprehensible. According to Cornell archaeologist Robert Ascher,
those khipu are “clearly non-numerical.” In 1981, Ascher and his mathematician wife,
Marcia, published a book that jolted the field by intimating that these “anomalous” khipu
may have been an early form of writing—one that Ascher told me was “rapidly
developing into something extremely interesting” just at the time when Inka culture was
demolished.
The Aschers slowly gained converts. “Most serious scholars of khipu today
believe that they were more than mnemonic devices, and probably much more,” Galen
Brokaw, an expert in ancient Andean texts at the State University of New York in
Buffalo, said to me. This view of khipu can seem absurd, Brokaw admitted, because the
scientists who propose that Tawantinsuyu was a literate empire also freely admit that no
one can read its documents. “Not a single narrative khipu has been convincingly
deciphered,” the Harvard anthropologist Gary Urton conceded, a situation he described as
“more than frustrating.”
Spurred in part by recent insights from textile scholars, Urton has been mounting
the most sustained, intensive attack on the khipu code ever performed. In Signs of the
Inka Khipu (2003), Urton for the first time systematically broke down khipu into their
grammatical constituents, and began using this catalog to create a relational khipu
database to help identify patterns in the arrangement of knots. Like cuneiform marks,
Urton told me, khipu probably did begin as the kind of accounting tools envisioned by
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Locke. But by the time Pizarro arrived they had evolved into a kind of three-dimensional
binary code, unlike any other form of writing on earth.
The Aschers worked mainly with khipu knots. But at a 1997 conference, William
J. Conklin, a researcher at the Textile Museum, in Washington, D.C., pointed out that the
knots might be just one part of the khipu system. In an interview, Conklin, perhaps the
first textile specialist to investigate khipu, explained, “When I started looking at khipu…I
saw this complex spinning and plying and color coding, in which every thread was made
in a complex way. I realized that 90 percent of the information was put into the string
before the knot was made.”
Building on this insight, Urton argued that khipu makers were forced by the very
nature of spinning and weaving into making a series of binary choices, including the type
of material (cotton or wool), the spin and ply direction of the string (which he described
as “S” or “Z,” after the “slant” of the threads), the direction (recto or verso) of the knot
attaching the pendant string to the primary, and the direction of the main axis of each
knot itself (S or Z). As a result, each knot is what he called a “seven-bit binary array,”
although the term is inexact because khipu had at least twenty-four possible string colors.
Each array encoded one of 2 6 × 24 possible “distinct information units”—a total of 1,536,
somewhat more than the estimated 1,000 to 1,500 Sumerian cuneiform signs, and more
than twice the approximately 600 to 800 Egyptian and Maya hieroglyphic symbols.
If Urton is right, khipu were unique. They were the world’s sole intrinsically
three-dimensional written documents (Braille is a translation of writing on paper) and the
only ones to use a “system of coding information” that “like the coding systems used in
present-day computer language, was structured primarily as a binary code.” In addition,
they may have been among the few examples of “semasiographic” writing—texts that,
unlike written English, Chinese, and Maya, are not representations of spoken language.
“A system of symbols does not have to replicate speech to communicate narrative,”
Catherine Julien, a historian of Andean cultures at Western Michigan University,
explained to me. “What will eventually be found in khipu is uncertain, but the idea that
they have to be a representation of speech has to be thrown out.”
Not all researchers embrace Urton’s binary theory. In an interview, Brokaw
argued that “there is no way to reconcile it with the decimal code in which the khipu
[also] clearly participate.” In addition, he said, Urton’s ideas have little support in
ethnographic data. But Brokaw was much more enthusiastic about other Urton khipu
work. Working with Harvard mathematician-weaver Carrie J. Brezine, Urton used the
new khipu database in 2005 to identify seven khipu that seem to represent a hierarchy of
accounting records. Found half a century ago in the home of a khipukaymayuq in
Puruchuco, an Inka administrative center near modern-day Lima, the khipu seemed to be
created in levels, with the numerical values on lower-level khipu adding up to those on
higher-level khipu. Fascinatingly, some of the knots in the top-level khipu seem not to be
numbers. Urton and Brezine argued that these anomalous introductory knots most likely
served to indicate the origin of the seven khipu, Puruchuco. The knots, if Urton and
Brezine are correct, would be the first-ever precisely deciphered “words” in khipu
“writing.”
Writing and reading are among the most basic methods of transmitting
information from one person to another. In cultures throughout the world, this procedure
is fundamentally similar. One reads a parade of symbols, taking up information with the
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eyes; emphasis and context is provided visually, by changing the size and form of the
symbols (printing in italics or boldface, increasing or diminishing the font size, scattering
words or characters around the page). All European and Asian cultures share the common
experience of reading—sitting in a chair, the book in one’s lap, wagging the head from
side to side (Europe) or up and down (Asia).
Because Tawantinsuyu existed only for a few centuries, it is widely assumed that
the Inka khipu built on other, earlier forms of writing that had been developed in the
region. And these cultures were unique, if Urton is right. Their books were loose bundles
of string—more practical, in some ways, than paper scrolls or books, because less
susceptible to water damage and physical pressure. They were read both tactilely, by
running the fingertips along the knots, and visually, by looking at the colors of the
strings. And whereas the choice of letters and words at the beginning of a sentence or
paragraph exercise little constraint on physical connection to those at the end, the choices
made by the khipu maker at the beginning of a string could not be undone halfway
through. As a result, each khipu pendant provided a burst of information at the beginning
that was refined further down the string.
However anomalous to European eyes, this form of writing has deep roots in
Andean culture. Knotted-string communication was but one aspect of these societies’
exploration of textile technology (see Chapter 3). In these cultures, Heather Lechtman, of
MIT, has argued, cloth “was the most important carrier of status, the material of choice
for the communication of message, whether religious, political, or scientific.” Similarly,
Urton told me, binary oppositions were a hallmark of the region’s peoples, who lived in
societies “typified to an extraordinary degree by dual organization,” from the division of
town populations into complementary “upper” and “lower” halves (moieties, in the
jargon) to the arrangement of poetry into dyadic units. In this environment, he said,
“khipu would be familiar.”
At the same time, Urton and other khipu specialists have been searching for an
Inka Rosetta stone—a colonial translation of an extant khipu. One candidate
exists—maybe. In 1996, Clara Miccinelli, an amateur historian from the Neapolitan
nobility, caused a stir by announcing that she had unearthed in her family archives both a
khipu and its Spanish translation (it encoded a folk song). But because the putative khipu
isn’t made the same way as other surviving khipus and the same documents also claim
that Pizarro conquered the Inka empire by poisoning its generals with arsenic-adulterated
wine, many U.S. scholars have questioned their authenticity. Angered by the doubts,
Miccinelli has thus far refused to let non-Italian researchers examine the documents,
although she did allow an Australian laboratory to evaluate their age with a mass
spectrometer. (The results, published in 2000, suggest that they are from the fifteenth
century.) Because of the controversy, most researchers have been, according to Brokaw,
“strategically ignoring” the Italian documents, at least for the present.
More widely accepted are the thirty-two khipu found in a tomb in the Peruvian
Amazon in 1996, one of which Urton tentatively deciphered as a census record for the
area in late pre-Hispanic times. With the help of a MacArthur fellowship he received in
2001, he has been searching Peruvian archives for something with more narrative content
to match against the other khipu—a quest, according to Julien, that “has a chance of
bearing fruit.” If Urton’s quest or others like it are successful, she told me, “We may be
able to hear the Inkas for the first time in their own voice.”
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I asked what she thought that voice might sound like—the voice of people attuned
to tension and cloth, people who saw the stones of the world charged with spirit, people
who had never seen animals larger than a llama, people who broke the world into
complementary halves and thought more in terms of up and down than north and south,
people who took in information about the world through their fingers.
“Foreign,” she said.
The Syphilis Exception
No one doubts today that European bacteria and viruses had a ruinous effect on
the Americas. So, too, did African diseases like malaria and yellow fever when they
arrived. The question inevitably arises as to whether there were any correspondingly
lethal infections from the Americas, payback to the conquistadors. One candidate was
long ago nominated: syphilis.
Syphilis is caused by Treponema pallidum, a wormlike bacterium that writhes in
corkscrew spirals on microscope slides. The disease occurs in four different forms, and
syphilis researchers disagree about whether the various forms are caused by different
subspecies of Treponema pallidum or whether Treponema pallidum is not actually a
single species but a brace of slightly different species, each responsible for a different set
of symptoms. One form of infection is bejel, which creates small, coldsore-like lesions
inside and around the mouth; it mainly afflicts the Middle East. The second, yaws, found
in tropical places worldwide, infects cuts and abrasions and causes long-lasting sores.
Neither disease spreads to bone or nerves, and they rarely kill their victims. Syphilis, the
third form, is another matter. Passed on mainly by sexual contact, it inflicts genital rashes
and sores before it apparently disappears, relieving sufferers but silently—and often
fatally—infecting their hearts, bones, and brains. (The fourth form, which exists mainly
in Mesoamerica, is pinta, a mild skin infection.)
The first recorded European epidemic of syphilis erupted in late 1494 or early
1495. In the former year, Charles VIII of France led fifty thousand vagabond mercenaries
from every alley of Europe to attack Naples, which he desired to rule. (He used
mercenaries because even at the dawn of the sixteenth century most European states did
not have the resources to support a standing military.) Charles conquered the city only to
learn after he had occupied it for a few months that the various Italian statelets were
massing against him, aided by a big contingent of Spanish troops. Struck with fear, the
king ignominiously fled with his men in the spring of 1495. Both entry and exit were
accompanied by sack, pillage, wanton slaughter, and mass rape. Somewhere along the
way Treponema pallidum wriggled into the bloodstream of Charles’s retreating
mercenaries. The most widely suggested source is their Spanish attackers, with
transmission occurring via the women violated by both sides. Whatever the case,
Charles’s army disintegrated as it fled, shedding companies of venereal soldiers along the
way. A more effective means for spreading syphilis over a large area is hard to imagine.
Within a year cities throughout Europe were banishing people afflicted with the disease.
Did Columbus bring the disease from the Americas, as the timing of the first
epidemic suggests? There are three main arguments to support an affirmative answer to
this question and an equal number against it. The first on the pro side is the sheer
deadliness of the disease—early records indicate that syphilis then was even more ghastly
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than it is now. Green, acorn-size boils filled with stinking liquid bubbled everywhere on
the body. Victims’ pain, one sixteenth-century observer noted, “were as thoughe they
hadde lyen in fire.” The fatality rate was high. Such deadliness fits in with the notion that
Treponema pallidum was new to Europe. Orthodox Darwinian theory predicts that over
time the effect of most transmissible diseases should moderate—the most lethal strains
kill their hosts so fast they cannot be passed on to other hosts. Thus syphilis, then wildly
virulent and lethal, acted like a new disease.
A second argument is that Europeans at the time believed that the disease had “its
origin and its birth from always in the island which is now named Española
[Hispaniola],” as the prominent Spanish doctor Ruy Díaz de Isla put it in 1539. Díaz
claimed that he had observed and tried to treat syphilis in the crew from Columbus’s first
voyage, including, it seems, the captain of the Pinta. Apparently the man picked up the
parasite in Hispaniola, brought it back to Europe, and died within months—but not before
passing it on to some luckless bedmate. Díaz de Isla’s testimony was backed by the
pro-Indian cleric Bartolomé de Las Casas, who was in Seville when Columbus returned.
Syphilis seems to have existed in the Americas before 1492—the third argument.
In the mid-1990s Bruce and Christine Rothschild, researchers at the Arthritis Center of
Northeast Ohio, in Youngstown, inspected 687 ancient Indian skeletons from the United
States and Ecuador for signs of syphilitic disease. Up to 40 percent of the skeletons from
some areas showed its presence. To nail down the chain of transmission, they
subsequently discovered—working in concert with researchers from the Dominican
Republic and Italy—that syphilis was equally common in Hispaniola when Columbus
arrived. Indeed, the disease seemed to date back about two thousand years—it may have
originated as a mutated form of yaws on the Colorado plateau.
The three main counterarguments against the America-as-origin theory are, first,
that Treponema pallidum may have existed in Europe before Columbus. Archaeologists
have turned up a few medieval skeletons, most of them in Britain, carrying what look like
the marks of syphilis. Although pre-1492 syphilitic skeletons exist in the Americas, even
a few European exemplars would undermine the Columbus-as-Typhoid-Mary case.
Indeed, some medical researchers propose that syphilis has always existed worldwide,
but manifested itself differently in different places. Second, the 1495 outbreak may not
have been the introduction of a new disease but the recognition of an old one, which until
then had been confused with Hansen’s disease (or, as it was known, leprosy).
Descriptions of syphilis during and after the 1494–95 epidemic and Hansen’s before it
are surprisingly similar; both were “treated” with mercury. In 1490 the pope abolished all
of the leprosaria in Europe, allowing hordes of sick people to return home. Could that
humanitarian gesture also have unleashed a storm of syphilis? At least some researchers
think it likely.
The third counterargument is psychological. In part, as Alfred Crosby admitted,
he initially devoted attention to the possible American origin of syphilis “because I was
uneasy about so many diseases crossing west over the Atlantic and none going east.” He
thought there must be some sort of “epidemiological-geographical symmetry.” Other
historians followed suit. Later Crosby realized that examining the evidence in the hope of
redressing the infectious balance was a mistake. “They want pox in Europe to balance the
scales for smallpox in Mexico,” Vine Deloria Jr. told me. “They’re all hoping to find
there’s a real Montezuma’s Revenge.”
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Yet even if syphilis did originate in the New World, the scales would not be
balanced. Syphilis is fascinating, “like all things venereal,” Crosby wrote in 2003, “but it
was not a history-maker” like smallpox. Treponema pallidum, awful as it was and is, did
not help topple empires or push whole peoples to extinction. “There was little symmetry
in the exchange of diseases between the Old and the New Worlds,” Crosby said, “and
there are few factors as influential in the history of the last half millennium as that.”
Calendar Math
Dictionaries define the calendar almost as if it were a machine: “a system for
fixing the beginning, length, and divisions of the civil year.” But in every society
calendars are much more than that. People experience time as both linear and circular. On
the one hand, it marches remorselessly from birth to death, a vector with fixed endpoints
and a constant velocity. On the other hand, time is cyclical, with the wheel of the seasons
endlessly spinning, and no clear end or beginning. Calendars are records of a culture’s
attempt to weight and reconcile these different visions.
In early European societies, the end of the year was regarded as dangerous: a
period when the calendar literally runs out of days, the landscape is blanketed by night
and cold, and nobody can be truly certain that the heavens would usher in a new year.
Embodying that mysterious time when the end of the calendar somehow looped round
and rejoined itself at the beginning, Romans celebrated Saturnalia, an upside-down week
when masters served their servants and slaves held the great offices of state. The
Christian calendar bracketed the strange, perilous final days of the year on one end with
the birth of Christ, symbol of renewal, on December 25, and on the other with Epiphany,
the day when the three kings recognized the infant Jesus as the Savior, another symbol of
renewal, on January 6. Christmas and Epiphany bridge the dangerous gap between the
end of one year and the beginning of the next.
The Mesoamerican calendar also tied together linear and cyclical time, but more
elaborately. In its most fully developed form, at the height of Maya power, it consisted of
three separate but interrelated calendars: a sacred tally known as the tzolk’in; the haab, a
secular calendar based, like the Western calendar, on the rotation of the sun; and the
Long Count, a system that, among other things, linked the other two.
The sacred calendar is both the calendar most dissimilar to Western calendars and
the most important culturally. Each day in the tzolk’in had a name and a number, in
somewhat the same way that one might refer to, say, “Wednesday the 15th.” In the
Western calendar, the day names (e.g., Wednesday) run through cycles of seven, making
weeks, and the day numbers (e.g., the 15th) run through cycles of 28, 30, or 31, making
months. The tzolk’in used the same principle, but with less variation in the lengths of the
cycles; it had a twenty-day “week” of named days and a thirteen-day “month” of
numbered days. The analogy I am drawing is imprecise; what I am describing as the
tzolk’in “week” was longer than the “month.” But just as Thursday the 16th follows
Wednesday the 15th in the Christian calendar, 10 Akbal would follow 9 Ik in the tzolk’in.
(The Maya had a twenty-day “week” in part because their number system was base-20,
instead of the base-10 in European societies.)
Because the tzolk’in was not intended to track the earth’s orbit around the sun, its
inventors didn’t have to worry about fitting their “weeks” and “months” into the 365 days
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of the solar year. Instead they simply set the first day of the year to be the first day of the
twenty-day “week” and the thirteen-day “month,” and let the cycle spin. In the language
of elementary school mathematics, the least common multiple (the smallest number that
two numbers will divide into evenly) of 13 and 20 is 260. Hence, the tzolk’in had a length
of 260 days.
In the Western calendar, a given combination of named and numbered days, such
as Wednesday the 15th, will occur a few times in a calendar year. For instance, in 2006
the 15th of the month falls on Wednesday three times, in February, March, and
November; in 2007 Wednesday the 15th occurs just once, in August. The irregular
intervals are due to the differing lengths of the months, which throw off the cycle. In the
tzolk’in, every “month” and every “week” are the same length. As a result, “Wednesday
the 15th”—or 1 Imix, to give a real example—in the tzolk’in recurs at precise intervals;
each is exactly 13 × 20 or 260 days apart.
Many researchers believe the movements of Venus, which Mesoamerican
astronomers tracked carefully, originally inspired the tzolk’in. Venus is visible for about
263 consecutive days as the morning star, then goes behind the sun for 50 days, then
reappears for another 263 days as the evening star. It was a powerful presence in the
heavens, as I noted in Chapter 8, and a calendar based on its celestial trajectory would
have shared some of that power. Within the sacred year, every day was thought to have
particular characteristics, so much so that people were often named after their birth dates:
12 Eb, 2 Ik, and so on. In some places men and women apparently could not marry if
they had the same name day. Days in the tzolk’in had import for larger occasions, too.
Events from ceremonies to declarations of war were thought to be more likely to succeed
if they occurred on a propitious day.
The Mesoamerican calendar was both more complex and more accurate than the
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European calendars of the same period. It consisted of a 365-day secular calendar, the
haab (right), much like contemporary European calendars. The haab was tied to the
second, sacred calendar, the tzolk’in (left), which was unlike any Western calendar. With
a “week” of twenty named days and a “month” of thirteen numbered days, the tzolk’in
produced a 260-day “year.” Mesoamerican societies used both simultaneously, so that
every date was labeled with two names (1 Ix 0 Xul in the drawing). I have not rendered
the haab as a wheel-within-wheel like the tzolk’in, even though it, too, had perfectly
regular “weeks” and “months.” This is because the haab had to fit the 365-day solar year,
which forced Maya calendar designers to spoil their system by tacking on an irregular,
extra-short month at the end.
Because people also needed a civil calendar for mundane purposes like knowing
when to sow and harvest, Mesoamerican societies had a second, secular calendar, the
haab: eighteen “months,” each of twenty days. (Unlike the tzolk’in, which counted off
the days from 1, the haab months began with 0; nobody knows why the system was
different.) Simple arithmetic shows that eighteen twenty-day months generates a 360-day
year, five days short of the requisite 365 days. Indians knew it, too. Rather than
sprinkling the extra five days throughout the year as we do, though, they tacked them
onto the end in a special “month” of their own. These days were thought to be
unlucky—it was as if the year ended with five straight days of Friday the 13th. Although
the ancient Maya knew (unlike their contemporaries in Europe) that the solar year is
actually 365¼ days, they did not bother to account for the extra quarter day; there were
no leap years in Mesoamerica. The failure to do so seems surprising, given that their
astronomers’ mania for precision had led them to measure the length of the lunar month
to within about ten seconds.
With two calendars, every day thus had two names, a sacred tzolk’in name and a
civil haab name. Usually the Maya referred to them by both at once: 1 Ix 0 Xul. The two
different calendars, each perfectly regular (but one more regular than the other), marched
in lockstep, forming what is now called the Calendar Round. After one 1 Ix 0 Xul, there
would not be another 1 Ix 0 Xul for 18,980 days, about fifty-two years.
By describing dates with both calendars Mesoamerican societies were able to give
every day in this fifty-two-year period a unique name. But they couldn’t distinguish one
fifty-two-year period from its predecessors and successors—as if the Christian calendar
couldn’t distinguish 1810, 1910, and 2010. To avoid confusion and acknowledge time’s
linear dimension, Mesoamerican societies invented the Long Count, which counts off the
days from a starting point that is believed to have been in mid-August, 3114 B.C. Long
Count dates consisted of the number of days, 20-day “months,” 360-day “years,”
7,200-day “decades,” and 144,000-day “centuries” since the beginning. Archaeologists
generally render these as a set of five numbers separated by dots. When Columbus
landed, on Tuesday, October 11, 1492, the Maya would have marked the day as
11.13.12.4.3, with the “centuries” first and the days last. In the tzolk’in and haab, the day
was 2 Akbal 6 Zotz.
Although extant Long Count dates have only five positions for numbers, the
Maya knew that eventually that time would pass and they would have to add more
positions. Indeed, their priestly mathematicians had calculated nineteen further positions,
culminating in what is now called the alautun, a period of 23,040,000,000 days, which is
about 63 million years. Probably the longest named interval of time in any calendar, the
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alautun is a testament to the grandiosity of Mesoamerican calendries. Just as the tzolk’in
is one of the most impeccably circular time cycles ever invented, the Long Count is
among the most purely linear, an arrow pointing straight ahead for millions of years into
the future.
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*1 According to Joseph Conrad, the violence was of culinary origin. “The Noble
Red Man was a mighty hunter,” explained the great novelist, “but his wives had not
mastered the art of conscientious cookery—and the consequences were deplorable. The
Seven Nations around the Great Lakes and the Horse tribes of the plains were but one
vast prey to raging dyspepsia.” Because their lives were blighted by “the morose
irritability which follows the consumption of ill-cooked food,” they were continually
prone to quarrels.
Return to text.
*2 In the United States and parts of Europe the name is “corn.” I use “maize”
because Indian maize—multicolored and mainly eaten after drying and grinding—is
strikingly unlike the sweet, yellow, uniform kernels usually evoked in North America by
the name “corn.” In Britain, “corn” can mean the principal cereal crop in a region—oats
in Scotland, for example, are sometimes referred to by the term.
Return to text.
*3 The Mayflower passengers are often called “Puritans,” but they disliked the
name. Instead they used terms like “separatists,” because they separated themselves from
the Church of England, or “saints,” because their church, patterned on the early Christian
church, was the “church of saints.” “Pilgrims” is the title preferred by the Society of
Mayflower Descendants.
Return to text.
*4 The first Europeans known to have reached the Americas were the Vikings,
who appeared off eastern Canada in the tenth century. Their short-lived venture had no
known effect on native life. Other European groups may also have arrived before
Columbus, but they, too, had no well-substantiated impact on the people they visited.
Return to text.
*5 These preposterous tales may actually be true; other amazing Smith stories
certainly are. While Smith was establishing a colony at Jamestown, for instance,
Pocahontas likely did save his life, although little of the rest of the legend embodied in
the Disney cartoon is true. The girl’s name, for instance, was actually
Mataoka—pocahontas, a teasing nickname, meant something like “little hellion.”
Mataoka was a priestess-in-training—a kind of pniese- to-be—in the central town of the
Powhatan alliance, a powerful confederacy in tidewater Virginia. Aged about twelve, she
may have protected Smith, but not, as he wrote, by interceding when he was a captive
and about to be executed in 1607. In fact, the “execution” was probably a ritual staged by
Wahunsenacawh, head of the Powhatan alliance, to establish his authority over Smith by
making him a member of the group; if Mataoka interceded, she was simply playing her
assigned role in the ritual. The incident in which she may have saved Smith’s life
occurred a year later, when she warned the English that Wahunsenacawh, who had tired
of them, was about to attack. In the Disney version, Smith returns to England after a bad
colonist shoots him in the shoulder. In truth, he did leave Virginia in 1609 for medical
treatment, but only because he somehow blew up a bag of gunpowder while wearing it
around his neck.
Return to text.
*6 Gorges may have met Tisquantum before. In 1605 the adventurer George
Weymouth abducted five Indians, conning three into boarding his ship voluntarily and
seizing the other two by the hair. According to Gorges’s memoirs, Tisquantum was one
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of the five. He stayed with Gorges for nine years, after which he went to New England
with John Smith. If this is correct, Tisquantum had barely come home before being
kidnapped again. Historians tend to discount Gorges’s tale, partly because his memoirs,
dictated late in life, mix up details, and partly because the notion that Tisquantum was
abducted twice just seems incredible.
Return to text.
*7 Runa Simi (Quechua, to the Spanish) is the language of all Inka names,
including “Inka.” I use the standard Runa Simi romanization, which means that I do not
use the Spanish “Inca.”
Return to text.
*8 The Inka sovereign had the title of “Inka”—he was the Inka—but he could also
include “Inka” in his name. In addition, Inka elites changed their names as they went
through their lives. Each Inka was thus known by several names, any of which might
include “Inka.”
Return to text.
*9 Because of their obsession with gold, the conquistadors are often dismissed as
“gold crazy.” In fact they were not so much gold crazy as status crazy. Like Hernán
Cortés, who conquered Mexico, Pizarro was born into the lower fringes of the nobility
and hoped by his exploits to earn titles, offices, and pensions from the Spanish crown. To
obtain these royal favors, their expeditions had to bring something back for the king.
Given the difficulty and expense of transportation, precious metals—“nonperishable,
divisible, and compact,” as historian Matthew Restall notes—were almost the only goods
that they could plausibly ship to Europe. Inka gold and silver thus represented to the
Spaniards the intoxicating prospect of social betterment.
Return to text.
*10 Just one major disease, syphilis, is believed to have spread the other way, from
the Americas to Europe, though this has long been controversial. See Appendix C, “The
Syphilis Exception.”
Return to text.
*11 Because the point is persistently misunderstood, it bears repeating that Indians’
relative genetic homogeneity does not imply genetic inferiority. Even a champion of
Indians like historian Francis Jennings got this wrong: “The Europeans’ capacity to resist
certain diseases,” he wrote in his polemical Invasion of America, “made them superior, in
the pure Darwinian sense, to the Indians.” No: Spaniards simply represented a wider
genetic array. Asserting their superiority is like saying that the motley mob at a football
game is somehow intrinsically superior to the closely related attendees of a family
reunion.
Return to text.
*12 In 2004 two U.S. anthropologists and a Venezuelan medical researcher
proposed that Native American susceptibility to infectious disease might have a second
cause: helper-T cells, which like HLAs help the immune system recognize foreign
objects. To simplify considerably, helper-T cells occur in two main types, one that targets
microorganisms and one that targets parasites. The body cannot sustain large numbers of
both, and hence adult immune systems tend to be skewed toward one or the other, usually
depending on whether as children they were more often exposed to microorganisms or
parasites. Indians have historically been burdened by flukes, tapeworms, and nematodes,
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so they have long had majorities of parasite-fighting helper-T cells. Europeans, who grew
up in germ-filled environments, usually lean the other way. As a result, the three
researchers suggested, adult Indians were—and possibly still are—more vulnerable to
infectious diseases than adult Europeans. Conversely, Europeans would be comparatively
more vulnerable to parasites. If further research supports this hypothesis, preventing
childhood parasite infections might allow Indian immune systems to orientate themselves
toward bacteria and viruses, possibly reducing future deaths.
Return to text.
*13 Historians increasingly shy away from the term “Aztec,” because the
nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt coined it in a misapprehension.
Humboldt’s “Aztecs” were actually the people of three nations, the members of the Triple
Alliance.
Return to text.
*14 I use the hedge words “basically,” “almost,” and “in essence” because sperm
actually have 50 to 100 mitochondria, just enough to power them through their short
lives. By contrast, the egg has as many as 100,000 mitochondria. When the sperm joins
the egg, the egg eliminates sperm mitochondria. Every now and then, though, a few
escape destruction and end up in the embryo’s cells.
Return to text.
*15 A puzzle to Europeans, anyway—Indians seem to have been, as a rule,
satisfied with traditional explanations of their origins.
Return to text.
*16 Hrdli ka’s complaint about the lack of skeletal evidence was unfair for
another reason: paleo-Indian skeletons are extremely rare. In Europe, archaeologists have
discovered scores of skeletons ten thousand years old or more. By contrast, only nine
reasonably complete skeletons of similar age have been found in North America (a few
more exist in South America, although, as with the Lagoa Santa skeletons, their
provenance is often unclear). “It’s a big mystery why we don’t find the burials,” the
University of Vermont archaeologist James Petersen told me. “Some Indians will tell you
that their dead all moved to a spiritual plane, and that’s about as good as any answer that
we’ve got.”
Return to text.
*17 Here and throughout I give the currently accepted dates, which are made with
better techniques and more grasp of the vagaries of carbon dating than were then
available to Haynes. Scientists discovered in the 1960 s that the rate of C 14 formation and
intake varied more than Libby had thought. As a result, raw C 14 dates must be corrected
(“calibrated,” in the jargon) to obtain calendar dates, something archaeologists do not
always make clear. In addition, they often write dates not as years A.D. or B.C. but as
years B.P. (Before Present), with the present set by convention at 1950 A.D. Thus 2000
B.P. is 50 B.C. In an attempt to reduce confusion, all dates in this book are ordinary
calendar dates—that is, radiocarbon dates corrected by the most recent calibration.
Scientists usually report C 14 dates with their potential error, as in 3000 ± 150 B.P. (1050
± 150 B.C.). To avoid typographical clutter, I do not include the error spread, believing
that readers understand the unavoidable uncertainties in measuring minute levels of
residual radioactivity.
Return to text.
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*18 I am not criticizing McNeill for failing to include the Americas on his list of
civilizations; he was simply reflecting the beliefs of his time. I would criticize World
History: Patterns of Change and Continuity, a high school text published two decades
later, in time for my son to encounter it. Referring exclusively to the “four initial centers”
of civilization, this “world history” allocated just nine pages to the pre-Columbian
Americas. The thesis of the book in your hands is that Native American history merits
more than nine pages.
Return to text.
*19 Given the choice between their own scratchy wool and the Indians’ smooth
cotton, the conquistadors threw away their clothes and donned native clothing. Later this
preference was mirrored in Europe. When cotton became readily available there in the
eighteenth century, it grabbed so much of the textile market that French woolmakers
persuaded the government to ban the new fiber. The law failed to stem the cotton tide. As
the historian Fernand Braudel noted, some woolmakers then thought outside the box:
they proposed sending prostitutes in cotton clothing to wander Paris streets, where police
would publicly strip them naked. In theory, bourgeois women would then avoid cotton
for fear of being mistaken for prostitutes and forcibly disrobed. This novel form of
protectionism was never put into place.
Return to text.
*20 The statues’ broad lips and flat noses have led “Africanist” historians like
Clyde Winters and Ivan Van Sertima to claim that the Olmecs either were visited by
Africans or had actually migrated from Africa. The African knowledge gained thereby
explains the Olmec’s rapid rise. These views are not widely endorsed. Surprisingly,
several noted archaeologists, including Betty Meggers and Gordon Ekholm, have
suggested the geographical opposite: that Olmec society was inspired by China. Visitors
from the Shang Dynasty are said to have crossed the Pacific to teach the ancient Olmec
how to write, build monuments, and worship a feline god. This hypothesis, too, has failed
to stir enthusiasm.
Return to text.
*21 Here, as elsewhere in this book, I am being chronologically inexact. The oldest
Zapotec palisade Flannery and Marcus excavated yielded calibrated radiocarbon dates in
the range between 1680 and 1410 B.C., which for brevity’s sake I render as “about 1550
B.C.”
Return to text.
*22 Actually, it didn’t. Inexplicably, the biggest unit, the 144,000-day
“millennium,” began with 13, rather than 0. The first day in the calendar was thus
13.0.0.0.0. When I remarked on the peculiarity of this exception to a mathematician, he
pointed out societies whose timekeeping systems are so irregular that children have to
learn rhymes to remember the number of days in the months (“Thirty days hath
September…”) are in no position to scoff at the calendrical eccentricities of other
cultures. At least all the “months” in the Mesoamerican calendar had the same number of
days, he said.
Return to text.
*23 Chak Tok Ich’aak’s name, like most Maya names, is easier to pronounce than
it looks. In most transliterations, all letters are pronounced much as they are in English,
except that x is “sh.” Thus the small ruin of Xpuhil is “Shpoo-heel.” The only difficulty is
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the glottal stop, the constriction of the throat that occurs when someone with a classic
Brooklyn accent pronounces “bottle.” In Maya, the glottal stop is indicated by an
apostrophe, as in Ich’aak. Chak Tok Ich’aak, incidentally, meant something like “Great
True Jaguar Claw.”
Return to text.
*24 The river’s main channel is in this area called the Solimões. English-language
maps usually put Manaus at the meeting of the Negro and the Solimões, with the latter
changing its name back to Amazon upstream. Brazilian maps say that the Amazon begins
at the conjunction of the Negro and Solimões.
Return to text.
*25 Terra preta exists in two forms: terra preta itself, a black soil thick with
pottery, and terra mulata, a lighter dark brown soil with much less pottery. A number of
researchers believe that although Indians made both, they deliberately created only the
terra mulata. Terra preta was the soil created directly around homes by charcoal kitchen
fires and organic refuse of various types. I use terra preta loosely to cover both.
Return to text.
298

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In putting together this book I worked under the shadow of great travelers,
scientists, and historians ranging from William H. Prescott, Francis Parkman, and John
Lloyd Stephens in the nineteenth century to (I cite only a sampler) William Cronon,
Alfred W. Crosby, William M. Denevan, Francis Jennings, John Hemming, Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Roderick Nash, and Carl Sauer in the twentieth and twenty-first. The
comparison is daunting. Luckily, I have been able to benefit from the advice,
encouragement, and criticism of many scholars, beginning with Crosby and Denevan
themselves. A number of researchers read the draft manuscript in part or whole, a great
kindness for which I thank Crosby, Denevan, William Balée, Clark Erickson, Susanna
Hecht, Frances Karttunen, George Lovell, Michael Moseley, James Petersen, and
William I. Woods. Although they helped me enormously, the book is mine in the end, as
are its remaining errors of fact and balance.
I am grateful to all the researchers who were kind enough to put aside their doubts
long enough to help a journalist, but in addition to those mentioned above I would
especially like to thank—for favors, insights, or just the gift of time—Helcio Amiral,
Flavio Aragon Cuevas, Charles Clement, Michael Crawford, Winifred Creamer, Vine
Deloria Jr., Henry F. Dobyns, Elizabeth Fenn, Stuart Fiedel, Susan deFrance, Jonathan
Haas, Susanna Hecht, Charles Kay, Patricia Lyon, Beata Madari, David Meltzer, Len
Morse-Fortier, Michael Moseley, Eduardo Neves, Hugo Perales, Amado Ramírez Leyva,
Anna C. Roosevelt, Nelsi N. Sadeck, the late Wim Sombroek, Russell Thornton, Alexei
Vranich, Patrick Ryan Williams, and a host of Bolivian, Brazilian, Canadian, Mexican,
and U.S. graduate students. My gratitude to the editors of the magazines in which bits of
1491 first appeared: Corby Kummer, Cullen Murphy, Sue Parilla, Bill Whitworth, and
the late Mike Kelly at The Atlantic Monthly; Tim Appenzeller, Elizabeth Culotta, Colin
Norman, and Leslie Roberts at Science; David Shipley and Carmel McCoubrey at the
New York Times; Nancy Franklin at Harvard Design Magazine; and George Lovell at
Journal of the Southwest.
For library access, travel tips, withering critiques, friendly encouragement at
psychologically critical times, and a daunting list of other favors I owe debts to Bob
Crease, Josh D’Aluisio-Guerreri, Dan Farmer (and all the folks on the fish.com listservs),
Dave Freedman, Judy Hooper, Pam Hunter (and Carl, too, of course), Toichiro and Masa
Kinoshita, Steve Mann, Cassie Phillips, Ellen Shell, Neal Stephenson, Gary Taubes, Dick
Teresi, and Zev Trachtenberg. Newell Blair Mann was a boon traveling companion in
Bolivia and Brazil; Bruce Bergethon indulged me by coming to Cahokia; Peter Menzel
went with me to Mexico four times. Jim Boyce helped get me to Oaxaca and CIMMYT.
Nick Springer provided a design for the rough maps that Tim Gibson and I put together.
Stephen S. Hall was really, really patient and really, really helpful about the immune
system. Ify and Ekene Nwokoye tried at various times to keep me organized. Brooke
Childs worked on photo permissions. Mark Plummer provided me with far too many
favors to list. The same for Rick Balkin (the fifth book for which he has done so). June
Kinoshita and Tod Machover allowed me to finish Chapter 4 in their carriage house in
Waltham. My deepest gratitude to Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel, who let my family
and me stay in their guesthouse in Napa, where Chapters 6 through 8 emerged into the
world. Caroline Mann read an early draft and provided many useful comments.
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Last-minute help from Dennis Normile and the Foreign Correspondents Club of Tokyo is
hereby recognized and thanked.
I am lucky in my publishers, Knopf in the United States and Granta in the United
Kingdom. In this, our third book together, Jon Segal at Knopf demonstrated his mastery
of not only the traditional pencil skills of the classic editor but also the new techniques
the times require to send a book on its way. In addition, I must doff my beret in Borzoi
land to Kevin Bourke, Roméo Enriquez, Ida Giragossian, Andy Hughes, and Virginia
Tan. At Granta, Sara Holloway gave excellent advice and tolerated repeated auctorial
meddling and procrastination. So many other people in so many places pulled strings on
my behalf, tolerated repeated phone calls, arranged site visits, edited or checked
manuscripts, and sent me hard-to-find articles and books that I could not possibly list
them all. I hope that in the end this book seems to them worth the trouble.
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NOTES
Every book is built on other books, the adage says, and this one is an exemplary
case. Think of the list of texts below as the architect’s specifications for 1491. Except that
this list is more selective, consisting as it does only of the works consulted necessary to
make a particular point, not everything used in the construction of the book. If at all
possible, I have cited printed, English-language versions of each source; many texts can
be found online, too, but URLs change so fast that I have avoided listing them whenever
possible. Texts available on the Web as of early 2005 are indicated by a star ( ); most
can be found through search engines or in such collections as Early English Books
Online, Project Gutenberg, the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican
Studies, the University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center, the University of
Maryland’s Early American Digital Archive, and the Virtual Cervantes Library.
Perhaps paradoxically, some works were so important to this book that my notes
give short shrift to them; they are in the background everywhere, but rarely summoned to
make a specific point. For the first section, these would include Terence d’Altroy’s The
Incas; William Cronon’s Changes in the Land; Alfred W. Crosby’s Columbian Exchange
and Ecological Imperialism; John Hemming’s Conquest of the Incas; Karen Ordahl
Kuppermann’s Indians and English; María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco’s History of
the Inca Realm; and Neal Salisbury’s Manitou and Providence.
As I stitched together the second section, books that kept my keyboard constant
company included Ignacio Bernal’s The Olmec World; Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs,
and Steel; Brian Fagan’s Ancient North America; Stuart Fiedel’s Prehistory of the
Americas; Nina Jablonski’s edited collection, The First Americans; the special issue of
the Boletín de Arqueología PUCP edited by Peter Kaulicke and William Isbell; Alan
Kolata’s The Tiwanaku; Mike Moseley’s marvelous Incas and Their Ancestors; and the
historical writings of David Meltzer, which I hope he will someday combine into a book,
so that people like me won’t have to keep piles of photocopies.
The third section sometimes seems like an extended riff on the three Cultural
Landscapes books assembled by William Denevan and written by Denevan; Thomas M.
Whitmore and B. L. Turner II; and William E. Doolittle. But I depended also on the
special September 1992 issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers
edited by Karl Butzer; the essays in The Great New Wilderness Debate, edited by J. Baird
Callicott and Michael P. Nelson; Michael Coe’s sturdy sourcebook, The Maya; Melvin
Fowler’s Cahokia Atlas; Shepard Krech’s Ecological Indian; the amazing Chronicles of
the Maya Kings and Queens, by Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube; and two books on
terra preta (and much else besides), Amazonian Dark Earths: Explorations in Space and
Time, edited by Bruno Glaser and William Woods, and Amazonian Dark Earths: Origin,
Properties, Management, edited by Johannes Lehmann et al. (Full citations are in the
Bibliography.)
Even a book of this length must leave out many things, given the magnitude of the
subject matter. Thus I ignored the inhabitants of the Americas’ northern and southern
extremes and barely touched on the Northwest Coast. The most painful decision, though,
was to omit, after it had been written, a section on the North American West. My qualms
were soothed by the recent appearance of Colin Calloway’s One Vast Winter Count, a
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magnificent synthesis of practically everything known about the subject.
1 / A View from Above
Erickson and scope of Beni earthworks: Erickson 2005, 2001, 2000b, 1995; see
also Denevan 2001: chap. 12.
Old view of Indians: Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the
University of Colorado in Boulder, mockingly summed the paradigm: “How many
Indians were there?—One million; Where did they come from?—Across the Bering
Strait land bridge; When did they come?—15,000 years ago (plus or minus 15 minutes);
How did they live?—They were squalid Stone Age hunter-gatherers wandering
nomadically about the landscape at the bare margins of subsistence, waiting hopefully,
millennium after millennium, for Europeans to show up and improve their quality of life”
(Churchill 2003:44).
Smithsonian-backed archaeologists: Dougherty and Calandra 1984 (small
numbers needed for causeways, 180; natural origins of mounds, 182–85). Their
discussion has been dismissed as “improbably interpreted” (Myers et al. 1992:87).
Roughly similar conclusions appear in Langstroth 1996.
Snow’s critiques: Interviews, Snow.
Pristine myth: Denevan 1992a, 1996b.
Wilderness Act: P.L. 88–577, 3 Sept. 1964 (“untrammeled,” section 2c); Callicott
1998:349–50 (act embodies “the conventional understanding of wilderness”).
Obligation to restore natural state: Cronon 1995a:36.
Fish weirs: Erickson 2000a.
Future options for Beni: Interviews, Erickson, Balée, CIDDEBENI. By leasing
their land to loggers and miners, the Kayapó in the southeast Amazon basin demonstrated
how Indians can disappoint environmentalists (Epstein 1993; the article is reproduced
and discussed in Slater 1995:121–24). Some environmentalists propose tucking the
eastern Beni into a nearby UNESCO biopre-serve, one of the 350 such preserves the
agency sponsors worldwide.
Devil tree: Interviews and email, Balée. I found no published work on this
specific form of obligate mutualism, but see, generally, Huxley and Cutler eds. 1991.
Ibibate and pottery: Interviews, Balée, Erickson; Erickson and Balée 2005; Balée
2000; Erickson 1995; Langstroth 1996.
Holmberg’s view of Sirionó: Holmberg 1969:17 (“brand,” “culturally
backward”), 37 (“sleepless night”), 38–39 (clothing), 110 (lack of musical instruments),
116 (“universe,” “uncrystallized”), 121 (count to three), 261 (“quintessence,” “raw
state”). After Holmberg’s death, Lauriston Sharp introduced Nomads as a study of “lowly
but instructive” “survivors” who “retained a variety of man’s earliest culture.” The book,
he said, “discovered, described, and thus introduced into history a new and in many
respects extraordinary Paleolithic experience” (Sharp 1969: xii–xiii). Nomads was a
widely used undergraduate text for decades (Erickson, pers. comm.).
Holmberg’s work and career: Interviews, Henry Dobyns; Doughty 1987;
Stearman 1987 (account of his blind walk, Chap. 4).
Lack of study of Beni and Langstroth: Interviews, Erickson, Langstroth;
Langstroth 1996.
Sirionó epidemics: The chronology is uncertain. Holmberg (1969:12) describes
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smallpox and influenza epidemics that forced the “decimated” Sirionó into mission life in
1927. Citing other sources, Swedish anthropologist Stig Rydén, who visited the Sirionó
briefly ten years after Holmberg, reports epidemics in 1920 and 1925, which he interprets
as episodes in a single big flu epidemic (Rydén 1941:25). But such heavy casualties are
less likely from a single source.
Sirionó population: Holmberg 1969:12 (fewer than 150 during his fieldwork).
Rydén (1941:21) estimated 6,000–10,000 in the late 1920s, presumably a pre-epidemic
count. Today there are 600–2,000 (Balée 1999; Townsend 1996:22). Stearman (1986:8)
estimated 3,000–6,000.
Stearman returns, bottleneck, abuse by army and ranchers, Holmberg’s failure to
grasp: Stearman 1984; Stearman 1987; author’s interviews, Balée, Erickson, Langstroth.
Holmberg (1969:8–9) noted the incidence of clubfoot and ear marks, but made little of it.
Migration of Sirionó: Interviews, Balée; Barry 1977; Priest 1980; Pärssinen 2003.
A Spanish account from 1636 suggests that they had arrived only a few decades before
(Métraux 1942:97), but this is not widely accepted.
First Beni research and Denevan thesis: Nordenskiöld 1979a; Denevan 1966.
Bauré culture and Erickson’s perspective: Interviews, Erickson; Erickson 1995,
2000b, 2005; Anon. 1743.
Las Casas ethnography: Casas 1992a; Wagner 1967:287–89 (publication history).
“lyve in that goulden”: Arber ed. 1885:71 (letter, Martire, P., to Charles V, 30
Sept. 1516).
“Indian wisdom”: “[W]e cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the
Baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the
most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect
Indian wisdom” (Thoreau 1906 [vol. 5]:131).
Crying Indian campaign: Krech 1999:14–16.
Indians without history: “In North America, whites are the bearers of
environmental original sin, because whites alone are recognized as laboring. But whites
are thus also, by the same token, the only real bearers of history. This is why our
flattery…of ‘simpler’ peoples is an act of such immense condescension. For in a modern
world defined by change, whites are portrayed as the only beings who make a difference”
(White 1995:175). The phrase “people without history” was popularized in an ironic
sense in Wolf 1997.
“unproductive waste”: Bancroft 1834–76 [vol. 1]:3–4.
Kroeber on warfare and agriculture: Kroeber 1934:10–12 (all quotes).
Conrad on Indian dyspepsia: Conrad 1923:vi.
“pagans expecting”: Morison 1974:737.
“chief function”: Trevor-Roper 1965:9. To be fair, the baron was dismissing all
indigenous peoples around the world, not singling out Indians.
Fitzgerald survey: Fitzgerald 1980:89–93 (“resolutely backward,” 90; “lazy,” 91;
“few paragraphs,” 93). See also, Axtell 1992.
Views have continued to appear: Examples, listed alphabetically by author,
include Bailey et al. 1983:9 (the “vast and virgin continent…was so sparsely populated
by Indians that they could be eliminated or shouldered aside. Such a magnificent
opportunity for a great democratic experiment would never come again”), quoted in
Axtell 1992:203; Bailyn et al. 1977:34 (“But the Indians’ hold upon the land was light….
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No where was more than one percent of the land available for horticulture actually under
cultivation”; editions of this textbook appeared, essentially unaltered, into the 1990s);
Berliner 2003 (“Prior to 1492, what is now the United States was sparsely inhabited,
unused, and undeveloped…. There was virtually no change, no growth for thousands of
years”); Billard 1975:20 (“To a virgin continent where prairie grass waved tall as a man
and vast forests perfumed the air for miles offshore came Spanish adventurer, French
trapper, Dutch sailor, and doughty Englishman”); Fernández-Armesto 2001:154 (many
Amazonian Indians’ lives were “unchanged for millennia” and the rainforest was “still a
laboratory of specimen peoples apparently suspended by nature in a state of so-called
underdevelopment”—the key word here being “suspended,” as in fixed in place,
motionless); McKibben 1989:53 (Wilderness Society founder Robert Marshall
concluding a currently unpopulated part of the United States was “as it existed outside
human history”); Sale 1990:315–16 (“the land of North America was still by every
account a lush and fertile wilderness…[which] gave off the aspect of an untouched
world”); Shabecoff 1993:23 (Lewis and Clark traveling through land “unchanged by
humans”); Shetler 1991:226 (“Pre-Columbian America was still the First Eden, a pristine
natural kingdom. The native people were transparent in the landscape, living as natural
elements of the ecosphere. Their world, the New World of Columbus, was a world of
barely perceptible human disturbance”).
“For thousands”: Current, Williams, and Brinkley 1987:1. Such statements are
often due less to prejudice than to European and American historians’ continuing
uncertainty about how to think about non-European and non-American societies. Thus on
the next page Current et al. describe Indians both as establishing some of “the world’s
most dazzling cultures” and “lack[ing] some of mankind’s most basic tools and
technologies” (2)—the latter state assuming, ethnocentrically, that European technologies
are “basic” whereas indigenous technologies are inessential. See Chaps. 2 and 3.
New perspectives and techniques: Crosby ed. 1994 (“faint smudges,” 7).
“replaced”: Vale 1998:231.
Growth of Bering Strait theory and fight over Chilean site: See Chap. 5.
Deloria index entries: Deloria 1995:284.
Invention of agriculture: See, e.g., Lev-Yadun, Gopher, and Abbo 2000.
Neolithic Revolution: I am simplifying here. Sumerian villages were growing
wheat and barley by about 6000 B.C. Around 4000 B.C. the villages became
hierarchically organized towns or cities. Early forms of writing date to at least 3000 B.C.
Five centuries later, the writing had become a unified system and the city of Uruk had a
population of forty thousand.
“The human career”: Wright 2005:45. Sumer was the first to develop agriculture,
laying the foundation for later civilizations in Egypt, Greece, India, and Mesopotamia.
China apparently invented farming on its own, but borrowed mathematics, writing, art,
and much else from Sumer. This last claim is fiercely debated, though, and some believe
China to have been as independent of Sumer as Peru and Mesoamerica.
Maize and early American domestications, Olmec accomplishments: See Chaps.
6, 7.
“one of the greatest”: Dantzig 1967:35. I am grateful to Dick Teresi for
introducing me to this terrific book.
History of zero: Kaplan 1999:11–57; Teresi 2002:22–25, 86–87, 379–82.
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“bleak, frigid land”: von Hagen, V., commentary, in Cieza de León 1959:272.
Tiwanaku: See chap. 7.
Populations of Tiwanaku and Paris: Kolata 1993:204–05; Bairoch, Batou, and
Chévre 1988:28. Metropolitan Paris reached a quarter million in about 1400.
Wari: See chap. 7.
Glacial evidence of dust storms: Thompson, Davis, and Mosley-Thompson 1994.
More than a few archaeologists are skeptical of this evidence (Erickson, pers. comm.).
Mega-Niños: Schimmelmann, Lange, and Meggers 2003; Meggers 1994.
Climate and Tiwanaku, Wari decline: Kolata 2000; Binford et al. 1997;
Thompson, Davis, and Mosley-Thompson 1994.
Little Ice Age: Lamb 1995:Chaps. 12, 13; Fagan 2001.
Maya: See Chap. 8.
Toltecs and Yucatán: Diehl 1983 (basic history); Coe 1999:165–80 (favoring
invasion scenario); Schele and Mathews 1998:198–201, esp. fn. 13 (arguing against). The
Schele-Mathews arguments center on disputed radiocarbon dates and interpretations of
artworks’ styles that to my mind seem all but to ignore their content.
Mississippians: See Chap. 8.
Plains Indians rock rings: Teresi 2002:107–09.
Lake Superior copper: S. R. Martin 1999.
Newly discovered Acre sites: Pärssinen et al. 2003. See also Erickson 2002.
Amazon: See Chap. 9.
Early world histories: E.g., Otto I 1966; Dinawari 1986.
2 / Why Billington Survived
Massasoit, Samoset, and Tisquantum: Bradford 1981:87–88; Winslow 1963b:37,
43–59 (“tall proper men,” 53); Deetz and Deetz 2000:61–62. In quotations I have
modernized the use of “f” and “v.”
Negotiations: Bradford 1981:87–89; Winslow 1963b:50–59 (“very lusty,” 57);
Deetz and Deetz 2000:61–62; Kuppermann 2000:7.
“A friendly Indian”: Wood et al. 1971:73.
Tisquantum’s life: I have relied greatly on Salisbury 1989. See also Adams
1892–93 (vol. 1): 22–44; Foreman 1943:20–21; Humins 1987; Kinnicutt 1914;
Shuffelton 1976.
Tisquantum, and fish fertilizer: Accounts of Squanto and fish fertilizer include
Winslow 1963a:81–82 (“increase,” 82); Bradford 1981:94–95; Morton 1632:89.
Skepticism about the aboriginality of fish fertilization dates back to 1939, but the
question was first raised forcefully in Rostlund 1957a and then still more strongly in Ceci
1975a, 1975b, 1990b. Ceci’s conclusions were disputed (Nanepashemet 1991; Russell
1975, 1980:166–67; Warden 1975), but much of the critique boiled down to refuting the
charge that the Indians were too stupid to figure out the use of fertilizer, an argument
Ceci did not make. Instead Ceci suggested that the added productivity would not have
been worth the added trouble, given the alternative of fallowing. Because Europeans had
much less land per person and less mobility, they had to resort to fertilization. In the early
1990s Stephen A. Mrozowski, an archaeologist at the University of Massachusetts in
Boston, unearthed evidence on Cape Cod suggesting that fish were used there as fertilizer
a few decades before the Mayflower, but he has not yet published it (interview,
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Mrozowski). The fish may have been ordinary household waste, though. Incidentally,
fish fertilizer was common in Peru (Denevan 2001:35–36).
Pilgrims’ lack of curiosity about Indian motives: The early chroniclers did explore
Tisquantum’s motives, especially when they accused him of scheming to better his
station. But they did not, in modern terms, try to put themselves in his place, which is
what is at issue here. Nor did the colonists puzzle over why they never suffered a
sustained attack, to judge by the lack of discussion by Bradford, Winslow et al. Here one
cannot charge the colonists with special insensitivity. Compared to later historians,
Pilgrim writers were more likely to see Indians as independent actors with their own
beliefs and goals (Kuppermann 2000:2–4).
“Divine providence”: Gookin 1792:148.
Dissatisfied historians: For a survey of ethnohistory’s origins, see Axtell 1978.
Explosion of research: Author’s interviews, Axtell, Neal Salisbury; Chaplin
2003:esp. 1445–55 (“No other field,” 1431).
Squanto as devil: Shuffelton 1976. Tisquantum, according to a Massachusett
dictionary, is a variant of musquantum, “he is angry.” When Indians had accidents,
according to Roger Williams, the minister and linguist who founded Rhode Island, “they
will say, God was angry and did it; musquantum manit, God is angry” (cited in
Shuffelton 1976:110).
Norumbega: D’Abate 1994; Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):155. The term referred
vaguely to a mythical city, the river that supposedly reached it, and the region around the
river, all somewhere in the Northeast.
Patuxet population: A vexing question. Tisquantum is said to have claimed it had
two thousand souls (James ed. 1963:29). According to the most widely cited colonial
observer, Daniel Gookin, the Wampanoag federation, of which Patuxet was a member,
“could raise, as the most credible and ancient Indians affirm, about three thousand men”
(Gookin 1792:148). If the federation were able to muster three thousand adult males, then
typical population estimates for the whole would be on the order of twelve to fifteen
thousand. The Wampanoag had about a dozen settlements, which would suggest that
Patuxet may have had a thousand inhabitants, or maybe a few more. Countering this,
anthropologist Kathleen Bragdon argues the available archaeological evidence suggests
that individual coastal settlements like Patuxet held “probably no more than two hundred
people” (Bragdon 1996:58). I have accepted Gookin’s figure because it was apparently
derived from contemporaneous Indians themselves, and because the archaeological
traces, as Bragdon herself notes, are difficult to interpret.
Names and distribution of Indian groups: Most historical accounts rely on Gookin
(1792:147–49), including the standard reference, Salwen (1978:160–76). See also
Bragdon 1996:20–25; Russell 1980:19–29; Salisbury 1982:13–30 passim; Vaughan
1995:50–58.
Dawnland: Stewart-Smith 1998:49.
Slow movement into New England: Bragdon 1996:57–58 (salt marshes, 1000
B.C.); Wilkie and Tager eds. 1991:10–11 (maps of distribution through time of known
paleo-Indian archaeological sites); Fagan 2000:101–04 (low carrying capacity of
postglacial areas); Petersen 2004. On a continental scale, the New England indigenous
groups were so small that one conscientious continental survey doesn’t even mention
them (Fagan 1991).
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Patchwork environment: Cronon 1983:19–33 (“tremendous variety,” 31).
Glottochronology: Glottochronology was invented in the 1960s by U.S. linguist
Morris Swadesh, a controversial figure who spent much of his career in Mexico after his
colorful political views cost him his passport during the McCarthy period. The technique
was the subject of his posthumously printed magnum opus, The Origin and
Diversification of Language (Swadesh ed. 1971). Glottochronology tries to ascertain how
long ago two languages diverged from a common ancestor language, as French and
Italian did from Latin. To accomplish this, Swadesh drew up a list of one hundred basic
terms, such as “ear,” “mother,” and “vomit.” When two languages are closely related,
Swadesh argued, their words for these terms will resemble each other. For example, the
French and Italian for “ear” are oreille and orecchio, terms similar enough to suggest that
these languages split off from each other relatively recently. On average, Swadesh
claimed, the words on the Swadesh list change at a rate of 14 percent every one thousand
years. Thus if two languages have similar entries for seventy-nine of the hundred words
on the Swadesh list, they broke off from a common ancestor about 1,500 years ago.
Unsurprisingly, Swadesh’s ideas have been criticized. Especially implausible is the
notion that linguistic change occurs at a constant, universal rate. Nonetheless researchers
use glottochronology, partly because of the lack of alternatives, and partly because the
basic idea intuitively seems correct (Swadesh 1971, 1952; Hymes 1971, 1960:5–6).
Glottochronological analysis of Algonquian languages: Fiedel 1987; Goddard
1978; Mulholland 1985.
Diverse New England communities: This description relies on the surveys of
evidence in Petersen and Cowrie 2002; Bragdon 1996:55–79 (“no name,” 58–59).
Bragdon (1996:39) adopts the term “conditional sedentism” for the coastal communities
(coined in Dunford 1992). For the growth of coastal communities, see Robinson 1994. In
the past, some have argued that coastal Indians practiced little agriculture (Ceci 1990a),
but Petersen and Cowrie assemble evidence to refute this.
Coastal diet: Little and Schoeninger 1995; Kavasch 1994.
Description of Patuxet: Author’s visit; James ed. 1963:7 (“Pleasant for air,”
alewives), 75–76; Winslow 1963b:8–43; Anon. ed. 1963:xx–xxi (map of area in 1613 by
Champlain). In these years big areas along the coastline had neatly planted maize fields,
traces of which survived even into the twentieth century (Delabarre and Wilder
1920:210–14).
Wetus, meals, and domestic style: Morton 1637:24–26; Wood 1977:86–88, 112
(“warmer,” 112); Bragdon 1996:104–07; Gookin 1792:149–51 (“so sweet,” 150–51).
“The best sort” of wetus, Gookin said, were “covered very neatly, tight, and warm, with
barks of trees”—“warm as the best English houses” (150). Clearly, the homes of the
wealthy in England were not leaky or drafty, but in that deforested land even the rich
could not afford the plentiful fires that kept Indians warm (Higginson 1792:121–22).
2,500 calories/day: Bennett 1955:table 1; Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):129–45
(European calorie levels).
Indian and European views on children: Kuppermann 2000:153–56; Williams
1936:29 (spoiling); Denys 1908:404; Ariés 1962 (European views).
Games: Wood 1977:103–06.
Character, training, and pniese: Salisbury 1989:229–31; Wood 1977:91–94 (“He
that speaks,” 91; “Beat them,” 93 [I have modernized “winch,” an obsolete form of
307

“flinch”]); Winslow 1624:55–56; James ed. 1963:77; Kittredge ed. 1913:151, quoted in
Axtell 1981:44.
Sachems: Wood 1977:97–99; Winslow 1624:56–60; Gookin 1792:154–55;
Salisbury 1982:42–43; Dunford 2001:32–37; Johnson 1993:chap. 3. To the north,
sachems were called sagamores, a distinction I am ignoring.
Population increase, attendant social change, and rise of political tensions: On the
one hand, there is surprisingly little archaeological evidence for coastal agriculture (Ceci
1990a); on the other, there are multiple colonial reports that the seacoast was thick with
farms. This scenario is an attempt to reconcile the apparently contradictory evidence
(Bragdon 1996:146–53). See also Johnson 1993:chap. 3; Thomas 1979:24–44 (“The
political scene,” 30); Metcalf 1974; and esp. Petersen and Cowrie 2002.
Indigenous warfare as less bloody: Hariot 1588:36–37; Williams 1936:188 (“farre
less”); Hirsch 1988; Kuppermann 2000:106–09; Russell 1980:187–94; Vaughan
1995:37–41. One reason for the low casualties, Williams observed, was that Indians
fought “with [so much] leaping and dancing, that seldome an Arrow hits.” (Evidently, the
games of archery dodgem paid off.) Some activists have claimed that scalping was
actually invented by white colonists. But European visitors witnessed the practice in the
1530s and 1540s, before any colonies existed north of Florida. “Hanging, disemboweling,
beheading, and drawing and quartering were commonplace” in Europe, James Axtell
observed, but not scalping. Each continent had its own forms of mutilation, and “it hardly
seems worth arguing” which was worse (Axtell 1980:463).
Early European exploration: Some of the vast literature includes Kuppermann
1997a; Bourque and Whitehead 1994; Quinn 1974: chap. 1; Salisbury 1982:51–54; Axtell
1994:154–55 (Corte-Real).
Verrazzano as first visitor: In his popular book, 1421: The Year the Chinese
Discovered America, Gavin Menzies, a British ex–naval officer, argues that in that year a
huge fleet led by warrior eunuchs sailed from China to the Americas. After the fleet lost
many ships to Caribbean reefs, it had to leave off “several thousand men and concubines”
in Rhode Island. They were supposed to be picked up by subsequent expeditions, but the
emperor who sponsored the expedition died, and his successor was not interested in
globetrotting. The stranded Chinese melted into the local population. Verrazzano noted
that the peoples of Rhode Island were more “beautiful” than other Indians, which to
Menzies is evidence that they were not Indians. So enchanting is the image of
500-foot-long Chinese junks in New England that I am sorry to report that few
researchers other than Menzies believe it (Menzies 2003:281–96 [“several thousand,”
291]).
Verrazzano’s account: Wroth ed. 1970:71–90, 133–43 (“densely populated,” 137;
“little bells,” 138; “irksome clamor,” 139; “showing,” “barbarous,” 140); Axtell
1992:156–57.
Indians’ physical appearance: Gookin 1792:152–53 (“one part,” 153); Higginson
1792:123; Morton 1632:32 (“as proper”); Wood 1977:82–83 (“more amiable,” 82,
“torture,” 83); Russell 1980:30–32. See also the drawings of Algonquians further south
by John White (Hulton 1984). Differences between colonial and native ways of treating
the body are explored in Kuppermann 2000:chap. 2 (bow string, 55–56), and Axtell
2000:154–58.
Popularity of Indian hairstyles: Kuppermann 1997b:225 (“lovelocks”); Higginson
308

1792:123.
Indian views of Europeans: Jaenen 2000 (weak, 76; ugly, 77; sexually
untrustworthy, 83; Micmac, 85; dirty, handkerchiefs, 87); Axtell 1988; Stannard 1992:5
(Indian cleanliness). As a rule, only wealthy Europeans bathed—commoners wiped
themselves with rags when they could.
Two hundred British ships: Cell 1965.
Champlain’s exploration: Biggar ed. 1922–36 (vol. 1):349–55, 397–401. See also,
Salisbury 1982:62–66, and the enjoyable Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):191–93, 199.
Gorges and Maine: Gorges 1890a:204–07; Salisbury 1982:92–94. I have followed
Salisbury rather than wholly accept Gorges’s account, which is confused and confusing.
Unlike Plymouth colony, the Maine expedition did not land in winter with no food. It lost
only two members the first winter, whereas death and illness so beset the Pilgrims that in
their first few months ashore they usually had only a few functioning people.
Pring: Pring 1905:51–63.
Smith and Pocahontas: The best retelling of the Pocahontas story I have come
across is Gunn Allen 2003. A similar, briefer account is Richter 2001:70–78. An
enjoyable nonscholarly account of Smith and Virginia is Milton 2000.
Smith in New England, Hunt kidnaps Tisquantum: Arber and Bradley eds. 1910
(vol. 1):192–205, 256–57 (“great troupes,” “fortie,” 205); (vol. 2):697–99; Bradford
1981:89–90; Winslow 1963b:52; 1963c:70; Gorges 1890a:209–11 (“worthlesse,” 209;
“warre,” 211).
French sailors killed or enslaved: Winship 1905:252 (shipwreck); Winslow
1963c:27–28 (finding body); Bradford 1981:92; Hubbard 1848:54–55; Adams
1892–93:6–10.
Billington: Bradford 1981:259–60 (hanging, “profanest”), 97 (runaway), 173–74;
Bradford 1906:13 (“knave”); Winslow 1963b:31 (shooting gun in ship); Winslow
1963d:69–72 (runaway); Prince 1855:291 (contempt charge); A. C. Mann 1976; Dillon
1975:203 (“troublesome”).
Framing my ancestor: My grandfather told me that Billington was an excellent
hunter and trapper. With this independent source of food, he could ignore colonial edicts.
To take him down a peg, my grandfather claimed, the powers that be sent men to rob his
traps. Billington caught on. He lay in wait and discovered a thief in the act. The thief shot
at him. My ancestor, a much better shot, returned fire, with predictably lethal
consequences. This story is unlikely but not impossible. The Billingtons were among the
few families to survive the first winter intact, suggesting that John may indeed have been
a fine hunter. And the Pilgrims’ contemporary reputation for ridding themselves of
religiously unsympathetic people was so widespread that in 1664 the poet Samuel Butler
mocked the practice in his popular satire Hudibras: “Our brethren of NEW ENGLAND
use / Choice malefactors to excuse, / And hang the guiltless in their stead, / Of whom the
Churches have less need” (Canto II, lines 409–12).
Actual first executions: During the catastrophic “starving time” (winter 1609–10)
in Jamestown, according to colony governor George Percy, “one of our Colline murdered
his [pregnant] wyfe Ripped the childe outt of her woambe and threw itt into the River and
after chopped the Mother in pieces and salted her for his foode.” Percy had the man
tortured and executed (Percy 1922:267). In March 1623 a man at Wessagusset, a rival
Massachusetts colony, was hanged for stealing maize from an Indian family (Morton
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1632:108–10; Bradford 1981:129). Bradford calls Billington’s execution “the first” in
Plymouth (259), so my family can claim that our ancestor was the first person of
European descent hanged in the Cape Cod area. I am arbitrarily not including the French
and Spaniards in Florida who executed each other by the score in the 1560s.
No idea where they were heading: According to Bradford, their intended
destination was “some place about Hudson’s River” (Bradford 1981:68), an assertion
backed up by the diplomat John Cory, who surveyed Plymouth in 1622 on behalf of
British investors (James ed. 1963:5–6). But they had earlier tried to obtain permission to
settle in what is now New England, so some historians have argued that it is possible that
they were going there. One theory is that the Dutch, who then had possession of the
Hudson, bribed the Mayflower’s captain to steer them away (Morton 1669:11–12). In any
case, they gave little evidence of knowing where they were going (Rutman 1960).
Smith’s claims, which seem to be true, are reported in Arber and Bradley eds. 1910 (vol.
2):891–92.
Pilgrim incompetence: Most of this catalog of error is lifted from Bates
1940:112–13.
Half the Pilgrims died: Accompanied by about 30 crew members, 102 people set
sail. One died en route, but a child was born before landfall, the wonderfully named
Oceanus Hopkins, making the party 102 again. Of these, 44 died before spring. Among
them was Bradford’s wife, Dorothy, thought to have drowned herself by leaping off the
Mayflower rather than face the unknown continent (Deetz and Deetz 2000:39, 59–60).
Robbing Indian graves and houses: Bradford 1981:73–75; Winslow 1963b:19–29
(“providence,” 26). Later the Pilgrims did try to compensate the Indians for the theft
(Winslow 1963c:61–62).
English vs. continental financing for colonies, British colonists’ flakiness and
helplessness: Kuppermann 2000:3–4, 11–15, 148 (“utterly,” 13); Cell 1965.
Inability to understand climate: The confusion is especially surprising given that a
number of British visitors had kept careful track of the weather (e.g., Anon. 1979).
Time of drought: Stahle et al. 1998.
Thoreau’s disdain: Thoreau 1906 (vol. 4):295–300 (“A party,” 300).
Tisquantum’s travels in New England: Baxter 1890:103–10 (“appears to,” 106);
Gorges 1890a:212–25; 1890b:26–30; Dermer 1619 (“void,” 131). The line from The
Tempest is in act 2, scene 2.
“Indians themselves”: Panzer 1995:118–19 (text of Sublimis Deus, Paul III).
Slany: Cell 1965:615.
Epidemic: Morton 1637:22–24 (“died,” 23; “Golgotha,” 23); Hubbard
1848:54–55 (French sailor’s curse); Spiess and Spiess 1987; Snow 1980:31–42; Snow
and Lanphear 1988. Salisbury (1982:103–05) suggests that the disease was the plague,
but Snow and Lanphear point out that this requires a chain of transmission that would
have trouble getting established. According to John Smith, “where I had seene 100 or 200
Salvages [in 1614], there is scarce ten to be found [in 1620]” (Arber and Bradley eds.
1910 [vol. 2]:259). The Pilgrims may have seen evidence of the original disease carrier.
One of the corpses they exhumed on Cape Cod had blond hair and was buried in a wrap
of sailor’s canvas (Winslow 1963b:27–28).
“The idea”: Gunn Allen 2003:30.
Mather’s experiment: Mather 1820 (vol. 1):507.
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Wampanoag spiritual and political crises: Salisbury 1989:235–38 (“their deities,”
236).
Plymouth and more than fifty villages: Pyne 1982:45–48; Cronon 1983:90.
Bradford and Gorges quotes: Anon. 1792:246 (attrib. to Bradford); Gorges,
1890b:77. From today’s point of view, these opinions were both unfortunately sanguine
and unfortunately common. Viz., John Winthrop, first governor of the rival colony in
Massachusetts Bay, describing in May 1634 the legal implications of the loss of many
natives to smallpox: “The Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess” (Winthrop
1976:116); or Cotton Mather calmly explaining that the land had been swept free “of
those pernicious creatures [Indians], to make room for better growth [Europeans]”
(quoted in C. F. Adams 1892–93 [vol. 1]:12).
“Could make [the] English”: Pratt 1858:485.
“He thinks we may”: Winslow 1963b:58.
Indians and guns: Chaplin 2001:111–12; Percy 1905–07:414 (all Jamestown
quotes).
Indian technology: Rosier 1605:21 (canoes); Kuppermann 2000:166–68 (shoes);
Bourque and Whitehead 1994:136–42 (Indian shallops). To some readers, the notion that
European technology did not determine the outcome of the culture clash may seem
absurd. Compare, though, the difference between the colonial histories of the Americas
and Africa. The indigenous inhabitants of both places had technology that is often
described as wildly inferior. And both places were the target of sustained colonial
enterprises by the same nations. In the Americas, though, the Indians were rapidly
defeated. “The Indians die so easily that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes
them to give up the ghost,” a missionary commented in 1699 (quoted in Crosby
2003b:37). Yet the majority of Africa—which had, if anything, an even more “inferior”
technological base—did not fall until the late nineteenth century. Technology was not a
dominant factor.
Massasoit’s negotiations: Winslow 1963b:43–59; Deetz and Deetz 2000:61–62.
Tisquantum’s machinations, death: Bradford 1981:108–09 (“came running,” “and
he thought,” “all was quiet”), 125–26 (Tisquantum’s death); Morton 1637:103–05;
Winslow 1963a:82 (thanksgiving); Humins 1987; Salisbury 1989; Shuffelton 1976.
Massasoit’s son and war in 1675: The best short account I have encountered is the
first section of Schultz and Tougias 1999. See also Richter 2001:90–109; Vaughan
1995:308–22; Salisbury 1982:Chap. 7.
1633 epidemic: Snow and Lanphear 1998.
3 / In the Land of Four Quarters
Pizarro’s body: Maples and Browning 1994:213–19.
Ezell thesis: Ezell 1961.
Dobyns in Peru and Mexico: Interviews, Dobyns; Dobyns 2004.
Prescott as first full history: As opposed to colonial-era accounts.
Politicization of Andean studies: Beyers 2001. Among the better known examples
(and actually a pretty good book) is Baudin 1961.
Dobyns’s 1963 article: Dobyns 1963.
Comparison of Inka realm to other states in 1491: Fernández-Armesto
2001:390–402 (“imperial potential,” 395).
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Inka realm as empire: Peruvian historian María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco
has argued that because the term “empire” has “Old World connotations”—it implies a
sophisticated center that dominates “barbarians” on the periphery, as was the case for
Rome—it should not be applied to the Inka, who overran societies bigger and more
cosmopolitan than themselves (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1999:x). Although one
can see what she means, the word is now used loosely to describe a situation in which “a
core polity gains control over a range of other societies” (D’Altroy 2002:6). And the Inka
did exactly that.
Inka goals, methods: “The Inkas were coolly pragmatic, efficient, and totalitarian
in their policies toward conquered nations, [attempting to impose] a restrictive area wide
standardization of politics, religion, customs, and language…. They maintained order by
instilling fear and using force rather than by encouraging knowledgeable participation”
(Dobyns and Doughty 1976:48–49).
Inka road system: Hyslop 1984:esp. 215–24, 342–43. The network appears to
have been planned carefully (Jenkins 2001:655–87).
“not with the Wars”: Rowe 1946:329.
“where millions”: Quoted in Lechtman 1996a:15. My next sentence is a revamped
version of Lechtman’s sentence following the quotation.
Steepest street: Filbert Street. I am grateful to Wade Roush for checking this
comparison.
“a wide range”: Diamond 1997:140.
20 of 34 life zones: Burger 1992:12. Only 2 percent of Peru is today considered
suitable for agriculture (ibid.).
“vertical archipelagoes”: Murra 1967.
Inka origin accounts: Cobo 1979:103–07 (“extreme ignorance,” 20; “ridiculous,”
103).
Betanzos: Betanzos 1996 (“thirty small,” 13; “two hundred,” 19). For a discussion
of his value as a source, see Fossa 2000.
Inkas vs. Chankas, Wiraqocha Inka vs. Inka Yupanki: Betanzos 1996:19–43 (“To
this,” 33; “crazy impulse,” 36); Cieza de León 1998:317 (Pizarro sees skins); Cobo
1979:130–33 (“valiant prince,” 130); Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua 1879:270–73;
D’Altroy 2002:62–65; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 2001:78–119; Santa 1963. Three
of the fifteen Spanish accounts of Inka history claim that Wiraqocha Inka, not Inka
Yupanki, fought the Chankas and then his father. Among them is Cobo, who confusingly
attributes what seem to be the same events to both. Rostworowski de Diez Canseco
(1999:28–34) convincingly argues against Wiraqocha. Pachakuti literally means “he who
remakes the world” or “he who turns over time and space,” but I have followed Michael
Moseley in an attempt to suggest how the name might have struck Inka ears (Moseley
2001:14).
Inka chronology: John H. Rowe laid out the timeline of the empire in an
influential article (Rowe 1946:203). Rowe relied on the calculation in a manuscript from
1586, still not published in its entirety, by Father Miguel Cabello Balboa (Cabello Balboa
1920). A Swedish historian, Åke Wedin, fiercely criticized Rowe’s use of this and other
sources (Wedin 1963, 1966). An insurmountable problem with the accounts, Wedin
insisted, was that they were not drawn from interviews with the elite record keepers who
actually kept track of events. The implication was that most other Indians were as reliably
312

informed about their society’s history as, say, average U.S. citizens are about their
society’s history. Since Wedin’s work historians have come to place a little more trust in
Spanish chronicles, which although not taken from record keepers tended to be drawn
from interviews with the educated elite. In addition, radiocarbon dating seems generally
to support the chronology (Michczynski and Adamska 1997). Rowe’s chronology is now
typically viewed as roughly correct, though subject to debate.
Fall of Chincha: Castro and Ortega Morejón 1974:91–104 (“son of the Sun,” 93;
“Everything,” 95). My thanks to Robert Crease for obtaining this article for me. See also
Santillán 1879:14; Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:113–14, 135 (brother left in command).
As Sarmiento de Gamboa notes, Chincha was a minor incident in a much larger
campaign against the bigger polity of Chimor (see Chap. 6). The rising claim on local
labor both reflected a deliberate strategy by the Inka state of gradually increasing control
and a rise in labor demand in the Inka state itself (Morris 1993:36–50).
Luttwak’s book: Luttwak 1976.
Inka as hegemonic empire: D’Altroy 1987; Hassig 1985.
Austere, contemporary feel of Inka art and architecture: Paternosto 1996:219–22
(influence on twentieth-century art); Thomson 2003:60–62, 86–87, 246–49.
Qosqo and Awkaypata: Rowe 1991, 1990. I thank Patricia Lyon for sending me a
copy of these articles. Descriptions of the structures are in Sarmiento de Gamboa
2000:85–91.
“point of a pin”: Pizarro 1969:272–73. He was describing Saqsawaman fortress,
at the edge of town, but the same is true of the structures in central Qosqo. Sancho was
similarly impressed (Sancho 1917:156–57). One viceroy wrote in 1571 that an Inka
fortress was “the work of the devil…for it does not seem possible that the strength and
skill of men could have made it” (quoted in Wright 2005:57).
Zeq’e and Wak’a: D’Altroy 2002:155–67 (“otherwise diligent,” 156 [D’Altroy
closed his remark by wryly noting “(see below)”]). He relied on Bauer 1998, which I
have also done. The classic colonial account is from Cobo 1990:51–84 (“more than a
thousand,” 9). But as a Booknews reviewer dryly noted, Cobo “based his account of
[Inka] religion almost entirely on previous literature (his employer having eradicated his
subject).”
Calendar: The Inka calendar and their means of reckoning time were so complex
that I have basically ducked and avoided them. See instead Aveni 1995:278–304.
Inka economics and labor system: Cobo 1979:189–93, 211–34; La Lone
1982:312–36; Murra 1980; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 2001:182–201; D’Altroy
2002:263–86.
Absence of money in Europe: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):467–68.
“managed to eradicate”: Vargas Llosa 1992:26.
Population reshuffling: Cieza de León 1959:59–63; Cobo 1979:189–93; D’Altroy
2002:248–49; Rowe 1946:269–70.
Disproportionate size of conquest: The contrast between the tiny Spanish force
and the vast Inka empire was noted as early as 1534, in the first narrative of the conquest,
Verdadera relación de la conquista del Perú, by Francisco de Xerez. “When in ancient
times have such few [triumphed] against so many?” he crowed. “And who has equaled
those of Spain? Certainly not the Jews nor the Greeks nor Romans, about whom most is
told.” Although the Romans subjugated many lands, Jerez said, “it was with equal or
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greater numbers of people, in known territories, provided with the usual sustenance, and
with paid captains and armies. But our Spaniards…were never more than two or three
hundred, sometimes a hundred or even less…. And the many times they traveled, they
were neither paid nor forced but went of their own will and at their own cost” (Xerez
1938:16–17).
Inka “crown” and clothes, saving of waste: Pizarro 1969:222–26 (clothing and
headband); Cobo 1979:244–47; Ruiz de Arce 1933:361 (spittle), cited in Hemming
2004:51; Rowe 1946:258–59.
Thupa Inka’s grandeur, military career: Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:112–19,
122–23 (“worshiped and adored,” 112); D’Altroy 2002:67–74. The description of the
litter is from Thupa Inka’s successor, but seems to apply in general (Pachacuti Yamqui
Salcamayhua 1879:79).
Thupa Inka’s marriage(s): Betanzos 1996:119–20; Cobo 1979:142; D’Altroy
2002:103–06. As Rowe notes, multiple sister-marriages were embedded in Inka
culture—the leader of the four brothers who arrived in Qosqo married his four sisters
(Rowe 1946:317–18). In addition, Andean societies traditionally recognized that a man
owed obligations to his sister’s son. By ensuring that his nephew was also his son, the
Inka tried to reduce the potential for intrafamilial conflict (Rostworowski de Diez
Canseco 2001:103–04).
Troubled accession of Wayna Qhapaq: Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:133–38;
Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua 1879:293–97; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco
2001:104–05. According to one report, Wayna Qhapaq was sixteen (Anello Oliva
1998:77). See also, Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samienego 1964.
Makework projects: Cieza de León 1959:77 (“mountain”), 137–38.
Ecuador campaign: Cobo 1979:155–60 (“commanded,” 155, “prepared himself,”
156); Betanzos 1996:182–83; Cieza de León 1959:46–50, 77–78; Cabello Balboa
1920:84–108; Niles 1999:97–105. Betanzos, but not Cobo, mentions Atawallpa’s
disgrace; Cobo, but not Betanzos, describes Wayna Qhapaq’s discomfiture; omissions are
consonant with the chroniclers’ biases.
“When his captains”: Pizarro 1969:198–99, 228 (vampire-bat wool).
Wayna Qhapaq’s death, succession battle: Cieza de León 1959:78–87;
1998:187–93; Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua 1879:309–24; Sarmiento de Gamboa
2000:144–60; Cabello Balboa 1920:113–21, 128–72; Anello Oliva 1998:87–92. A clear
summary is D’Altroy 2002:76–83; see also, Rostworowski de Diez Canseco
2001:110–25. Betanzos’s narrative, though useful, is understandably biased; his wife was
Atawallpa’s sister (Betanzos 1996:183–234). Pedro Pizarro’s version of events
interestingly highlights the internal politics of Qosqo (Pizarro 1969:198–206). Garcilaso
de la Vega says that Wayna Qhapaq’s death followed omens and prophecies of the
collapse of the empire, which seems unlikely. If true, though, it may account for a certain
fatalism toward the Spanish among the Inka elite (Gheerbrant ed. 1962:284–89). He also
suggests that the war occurred after Wayna Qhapaq split up Tawantinsuyu in a Lear-like
fashion, giving Atawallpa a rump kingdom to the north. Most ethnographers and
historians disagree. Garcilaso’s description of the war itself as consisting in essence of a
single big engagement outside Qosqo is at variance with other accounts.
Washkar’s marriage and his mother’s marriage: Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua
1879:308; Cabello Balboa 1920:120–21 (“begging,” 121).
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Cieza de León casualty estimates: Cieza de León 1959:84 (16,000), 87 (35,000).
Skull cup: “I saw the head with the skin, the dried flesh, and its hair, and it had
the teeth closed, and between them was a silver straw, and attached to the top of the head
was a gold cup [with a hole in the bottom that entered the skull], from which he drank
when memories of [Atawallpa’s] war against his brother came to mind; he put chicha in
the cup, from which it came out through the mouth, and he drank through the straw”
(Mena 1930:250–53). The cup is also mentioned in Cieza de León 1959:84.
Pizarro and Atawallpa at Cajamarca: I draw mainly on Hemming 2004:30–85.
See also, Sancho 1917:9–19; Mena 1930:231–81; Pizarro 1969:171–221 (“made water,”
179–80); Ruiz de Arce 1933:363 (“mounds”), cited in Hemming 2004:42.
Spaniards and gold: Restall 2003:22–23 (“nonperishable,” 23), 34–37, 65–67.
“What could,” “No amount”: Hemming 2004:115, 158. See also the vigorously
argued Guilmartin 1991.
Marveling at failure to develop steel: “It is worthy of remark, that…the Peruvians,
in their progress towards civilization, should never have detected the use of iron, which
lay around them in abundance” (Prescott 2000:810).
Andean metallurgy: Burger and Gordon 1998; Lechtman 1996b (“hardness,” 35;
“plasticity,” 37); 1993 (“eminent scholar,” 253); 1984.
Different contexts of technology: Interviews, Lechtman (“people solved”),
Conklin, Leonard Morse-Fortier (force of sling projectiles); Ihde 2000.
Inka ships: Cieza de León 1998: 75–76; Heyerdahl 1996; Hemming 2004:25;
Prescott 2000:854–55; interview, Vranich (replica boat created for documentary). See the
account of the new ship at http://www.reedboat.org.
“without endangering themselves”: Sancho 1917:62.
Importance and fineness of textiles in Tawantinsuyu: Murra 1964 (stripping
soldiers, 718); Lechtman 1993:254–59 (five hundred threads per inch, 257). “The
[cotton] clothes they made were so fine that we [Spaniards] thought they were made of
silk, worked with figures of beaten gold, beautifully made” (Mena 1930:225).
Cloth armor: Lechtman 1993:256; Murra 1964:718 (stripping of soldiers); Rowe
1946:274–75; Montell 1929:Fig. 21.
“with such force”: Enríquez de Guzmán 1862:99.
Inka rebellion with flaming missiles: Hemming 2004:193–94; Prescott
2000:1021–23.
Inka armies and horses: Hemming 2004 (“Even when,” 111–12; “dreaded,” 158).
Inka roads and horses: Letter, Pizarro, H., to Oidores of Santo Domingo, 23 Nov.
1533, quoted in Hemming 2004:31 (“so bad”); Prescott 2000:954. On one steep road “all
made of steps of very small stones,” Pedro Sancho wrote, Pizarro’s “horses toiled so
much that, when they had finished going up, the greater part of them had lost their shoes
and worn down the hoofs of all four feet” (Sancho 1917:63).
Inka military techniques: Sancho 1917:67; Hemming 2004:195 (bolas); Prescott
2000:922, 984.
Historians ignore disease: Interviews, Crosby, Denevan, Dobyns. According to
Dobyns, “the published works focused on New World historic epidemiology could be
counted on the fingers of one hand” at that time (Dobyns 1995). Actually, Dobyns’s own
count is eighteen articles prior to 1964. Still, most researchers in the field did not “seem
to be paying much attention” (ibid.), e.g., the claim that “not until 1720 did any great
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losses through pestilence occur in Peru” (Kubler 1946:336). Peruvian researchers noted
the epidemics (Patrón 1894 [proposing that Wayna Qhapaq died of bartonellosis, not
smallpox]), but others were like U.S. researchers in failing to grasp the impact of disease
(Vellard 1956). I am grateful to Robert Crease for helping me obtain a copy of this last
article.
Cieza de León: Cook and Cook 1998 (bio); Cieza de León 1959:52 (“great
plague”).
Elite losses to smallpox: Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:144–45; Pachacuti Yamqui
Salcamayhua 1879:307 (“scabs,” “millions”); Murúa 1962–64 (vol. 1):136 (“infinite”),
quoted in Crosby 2003b:53; Pizarro 1969:196–97; Cobo 1979:160; Poma de Ayala
2001:114, 141, 288; Hopkins 1983:208–11. For a dissenting view, see McCaa, Nimlos,
and Hampe-Martínez 2004.
Evolution of smallpox: Baxby 1981; Gubser and Smith 2002.
“virgin soil”: Crosby 1976.
India smallpox study: Rao 1972:37, cited in Fenn 2001:21.
“may well have been halved”: Dobyns 1963:497.
Thucydides’ account of epidemic: Thucydides 1934:109–14.
Not in a European language: Crosby 2003b:xxii.
Royal mummies: Pizarro 1969:202–04, 251–54 (“the greater part,” 203); Estete,
M.d., untitled narrative of journey to Pachacamac, quoted in Hemming 2004:127
(“seated”); Sancho 1917:159, 170, 195, 200; Rowe 1946:308; D’Altroy 2002:96–99,
141–42. Sarmiento de Gamboa matter-of-factly describes Inka methods of storing bodies
after death, though he only uses the word “mummy” once (Sarmiento de Gamboa
2000:120–23, 135–36, 145–46).
Burning of Thupa Inka: Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:121, 159; Betanzos
1996:74–79; D’Altroy 2002:108.
Atawallpa execution: Rowe 1997. I thank Patricia Lyon for sending me this
article.
“win the land”: Pizarro 1969:199. See also, Sancho 1917:171–72; Wright
1992:72–75.
European failures without epidemics, factions: Restall 2003:70–72 (Mexico,
Florida); Hemming 1978:69–84 (Brazil); White 1991: esp. Chap. 4 (France).
Additional smallpox epidemics: Hopkins 1983:212–13 (“They died by scores,”
quoted on 213).
Typhus, flu, etc., 90 percent death toll: Dobyns 1963. Dobyns’s argument was
supported almost two decades later in Noble David Cook’s book-length survey, which
argued that six main epidemics hit Tawantinsuyu between 1524 and 1614, reducing the
population by an estimated 93 percent (N. D. Cook 1981).
Smallpox in Hispaniola: The first evidence of smallpox’s arrival is in a letter of
10 January 1519 by the Hieronymite Fathers, then entrusted with ruling Hispaniola. At
the time, the disease had killed a third of the island’s inhabitants and spread to Puerto
Rico (Henige 1986:17–19). Smallpox may not have been the first Caribbean epidemic.
Francisco Guerra, a medical historian at the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, in Spain,
makes a strong case for a swine influenza epidemic in 1493 that “was responsible for the
disappearance of the American Indians in the Antilles” (Guerra 1988:305). Noble David
Cook suggests the epidemic was smallpox (N. D. Cook 2003).
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Smallpox hits Mexico: The evidence is examined carefully in McCaa 1995. See
also, Hopkins 1983:204–08 and the sources in Chap. 4.
“Debated since”: Denevan ed. 1976:xvii. Denevan was far from alone in his
interest. At about the same time, for instance, Wilbur Jacobs, a historian at the University
of California in Santa Barbara, described the puzzle of native numbers as “truly one of
the most fascinating number games in history” (Jacobs 1974:123).
Mooney: Mooney 1928; Ubelaker 1976, 1988. Mooney’s article was posthumous.
Kroeber’s estimates: Kroeber 1934 (“sharply localized,” 25); 1939:31, 134, 166.
Greenland is included in Kroeber’s population density figure, lowering it somewhat.
Sauer, Cook, and Borah: Among their many works are Sauer 1935; Cook and
Simpson 1948; Borah and Cook 1964; Cook and Borah 1963, 1979. See also, Denevan
1996c.
“Historians and anthropologists”: Dobyns 1995.
World population in 1500: United Nations Population Division 1999:5.
“greatest destruction”: Lovell 1992:426. See also, Crosby 1986:208–09; Porter
1998:163; Jacobs 1974:128.
Dobyns’s 1966 article, Denevan’s book: Dobyns 1966; Denevan 1976.
Dobyns’s ideas attacked: Author’s interviews, Dobyns, Russell Thornton,
Shepard Krech. See also Thornton 1987:34–36; Krech 1999:83–84; Henige 1998, 1990,
1978b.
Dobyns revises figures: Dobyns 1983:42. The new figure was for North America
only.
Henige bio, critiques: Interview, Henige; Henige 1998 (bio, 4–5; “Suspect,” 314);
1978b (Hispaniola); Osborne 1998.
“You always hear”: Interview and email, Stiffarm. The unconscious persistence of
the view that before Columbus the Americas were uninhabited, or almost so, is amazing.
As late as 1986 Bernard Bailyn, past president of the American Historical Society,
published a book called The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (Bailyn
1986). The book is about British immigration. But the title also suggests that before
Europeans the land was not peopled. Indeed, Indians are almost not to be found in the
text.
“crater”: Interview, Wilson; Wilson 1999.
4 / Frequently Asked Questions
De Soto: Duncan 1995; Mena 1930:264–66 (Challcochima). De Soto, Hemming
observed, was “as brutal as any other conquistador. He [led] the force that raped the
mamaconas [nuns, more or less] of Cajas during the march toward Cajamarca. His
reputation among some modern writers of being more humane than his companions is
undeserved” (Hemming 2004:555).
De Soto expedition: The numbers of men and animals differ somewhat in
different accounts. I use Ramenofsky 1987:59. The basic sources are “Gentleman of
Elvas” 1922 and its apparent predecessor, Fernández de Biedma 1922. These and other
documents are collected in Clayton, Knight, and Moore eds. 1993. The state of scholarly
knowledge is assayed in Galloway ed. 1997. Popular accounts include Wilson
1999:134–37; Morgan 1993:72–75; Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):28–31.
Hudson’s reconstruction of route: Interview, Hudson; Hudson 1993. For a fierce
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debate on the reliability of these reconstructions, see Henige 1993; Hudson, DePratter,
and Smith 1993; Hudson et al. 1994.
De Soto’s passage over Mississippi: “Gentleman of Elvas” 1922 (vol. 1):112–17
(all quotes, 113); Fernández de Biedma 1922 (vol. 2):25–28. See also Rollings
1995:39–40.
La Salle expedition: Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):920–30.
Contrast between De Soto and La Salle’s experiences: Author’s interviews,
Galloway, Hudson, Ramenofsky; Ramenofsky 1987:55–63; Burnett and Murray
1993:228.
Pigs as source for epidemic: Ramenofsky and Galloway 1997:271–73; Crosby
1986:172–76, 212–13 (suggesting epidemic disease may also have come before De Soto),
273; Crosby 2003b:77 (importance of pigs to Spanish).
Indian lack of domesticated animals, lactose intolerance: Crosby 1986:19, 27;
Ridley 2000:192–94. Francisco Guerra notes that the Philippines did not experience
epidemics from colonization, though its inhabitants were as isolated as Indians. The
critical difference, he suggests, was the existence of domesticated animals, especially
pigs, in the Philippines (Guerra 1988:323).
Caddo and Coosa: Perttula 1993, 1991:512–14; M. T. Smith 1994:264–65; M. T.
Smith 1987.
Mass graves in the Southeast: M. T. Smith 1987:60–68.
1918 flu epidemic: Crosby 2003a.
Plague origin, losses: Epidemiologists increasingly question whether the Black
Death was bubonic plague. Rats and fleas carry bubonic plague, but the Black Death
spread faster—and over colder land—than these animals usually travel. And Y. pestis has
never been shown to be as contagious as the Black Death. The epidemic may instead
have been of a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola (Scott and Duncan 2001). I am grateful to
David Henige for drawing this discussion to my attention. For losses, see, e.g., Wrigley
1969:63.
Population nadir: Ubelaker 1992:169–76, table 3. The 1890 U.S. census listed the
Native American population as 237,000 (United States Bureau of the Census 1937:3,
table 2). But it is widely believed that the Census Bureau undercounted, both because it
did not accurately survey many native areas and because its definition of “Indian” was
too restrictive. Most demographers double the reported number.
Zambardino critique: Zambardino 1980 (“the errors multiply,” 8; “meaningful,”
18).
“no better than”: Crosby 1992:175.
Skepticism: Interviews, Ubelaker, Snow; Snow 1995 (“no support,” 1604); 1992;
Snow and Lanphear 1988. I believe David Henige coined “Low Counter” and “High
Counter.”
Historians’ reluctance: Calloway 2003:415–16 (“boggle,” 415); McNeill
1998:19–23.
1967 measles epidemic: Interviews, Napoleon Chagnon, Thomas Headland,
Francis Black, Patrick Tierney; Neel et al. 1970; Neel 1977:155–68. The epidemic
became the subject of controversy when U.S. journalist Patrick Tierney accused Neel and
his anthropologist coauthor, Chagnon, of exacerbating and perhaps even causing it in the
course of an unethical experiment on the effects of vaccination (Tierney 2000). After a
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furor, researchers generally agreed that the likelihood that Neel and Chagnon had spread
measles was negligible (Mann 2000a, 2001; Neel et al. 2001); as the main text indicates,
the epidemic apparently originated with the Tootobi missionaries (Headland 2000). The
Yanomamo are also known as Yanomami, Yanoama, and Yanomamö, the different terms
coming from different dialects.
Distribution of blood types: Crosby 2003b:22–30. For a more complete
explanation, see Crawford 1998:95–101.
Relative lack of genetic disease: Author’s interviews, Black, Crosby, Dobyns
(cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s chorea); Black 2004:155 (asthma and autoimmune
diseases); Hurtado, Hurtado, and Hill 2004:185 (diabetes). Dobyns stressed that the
evidence is weak. Because Europeans recorded “things like the lack of beggars and
madmen in city streets,” he told me, “you can assemble a sketchy picture” of societies
with little genetic disease. “But as Henige would say,” Dobyns remarked of his fiercest
critic, “it’s an argument from silence.”
Black and HLA types: Author’s interviews, Black, Stephen S. Hall; Black 1992,
1994, 2004; Crawford 1998:131–34. HLA classes are succinctly explained in Hall
1997:368–69. My thanks to Steve Hall for walking me through this material.
“Europeans’ capacity”: Jennings 1975:22.
Russian fur trade: Standard histories include Fisher 1943; Lincoln 1994.
1768–69 epidemic: Bril 1988:238 (“No one knows”); Samwell 1967:1252–59
(“Ruins,” 1252); Sauer 1802:306–08. Sauer’s death tally of 5,368 is identical to that of
the writer William Coxe (Coxe 1780:5) and reasonably congruent with the estimate that
“three fourths” of the populace died by French consul Jean Baptiste Barthelemy Lesseps,
who was traveling in Kamchatka at the time (Lesseps 1790:128–29 [“three fourths,”
128]). I am grateful to Elizabeth Fenn for providing me with her notes on these
references, from which I have taken the material from Lessep and Sauer.
“As soon as”: Füch 1988:169–70. Again I thank Prof. Fenn.
Helper-T cell hypothesis: Hurtado, Hurtado and Hill 2004.
Revolutionary War epidemic: Interviews, Fenn; Fenn 2001 (start of Boston
epidemic, 46; ten to thirty a day, 47; one day before the Declaration, 53–54; “Ethiopian
regiment,” 57–61; Quebec, 62–71; Adams, 79).
Mexico City epidemic: Calloway 2003:417–19 (“It seems likely,” 561); Fenn
2001:138–40 (Fenn suggests that a third epidemic, which moved west from New Orleans,
may have “collided” with the Mexico City epidemic in the Southwest).
Hopi-Nermernuh-Shoshone-Blackfoot connection: Thompson 1916:318–25,
336–38 (“with our sharp,” 336–37); Calloway 2003:419–21 (Sioux, 421); Fenn
2001:211–22. See also, Ewers 1973. “Blackfoot” usually refers to groups in Canada;
“Blackfeet,” to those in the United States.
“winter counts”: Sundstrom 1997; Calloway 2003:424. In Sundstrom’s survey of
winter counts, all but one of the fifteen that cover 1780–82 characterized at least one of
the years with the symbol for an epidemic, though some called it measles instead of
smallpox (many groups initially did not distinguish them). Plains Indians defined a year
as the period between the first snowfall of one winter and the first snowfall of the next, so
it was not the same as a European year.
Pox in Northwest: Calloway 2003:421–23; Fenn 2001:224–32 (“great
preponderance,” 227), 250–58; Harris 1994; Boyd 1999:esp. 21–39.
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Vancouver expedition: Vancouver 1984 (vol. 2):516–40 and passim
(“promiscuously scattered,” 516); Puget 1939:198 (“pitted”).
Quarantine: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):86–87; Salisbury 1982:106 (“could only”);
Cronon 1983:88.
Wider impact of epidemics: Crosby 1992; Calloway 2003:419–26; Stannard
1991:532–33; Thornton 1987; Hopkins 1994:48 (“my people”); Salisbury 1982: 105–06.
Death of Hawaiian king and queen: Kuykendall 1947:76–81.
Montreal peace negotiations: Havard 2001:49, 65 (Haudenosaunee losses),
130–02 (epidemic and Kondiaronk’s death).
Former captives: Haudenosaunee Brandão 1997:72–81.
Fates of Cree, Shoshone, Omaha: Calloway 2003:422–26 (“The country,” 422).
See also, Campbell 2003.
1524 meeting: Sahagún 1980; Klor de Alva 1990. See also, Motolinía
1950:37–38, 174–86 (de Valencia’s life).
“bishops and pampered prelates”: Prescott 2000:637.
Franciscan-Mexica debate: Sahagún 1980:lines 109, 115, 117, 217–18, 223–29,
235–37, 759–63, 1054 (“gods were not powerful,” 54 [summary]). See also,
León-Portilla 1963:62–70.
Teotihuacan and its influence: Often-cited works include Cowgill 1997; Carrasco,
Jones, and Sessions eds. 2000; Berlo ed. 1993.
Mexica arrival date: Smith 1984.
Tezozómoc’s account: Quoted in Sullivan and Knab eds., trans. 1994:98–100.
Tlacaelel: Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin 1997 (vol. 1):41–53, 135–45; (vol.
2):33–37, 89, 109; León-Portilla 1992a:xxxvii–xli (“It is not fitting,” xxxviii);
1963:158–66. As Chimalpahin put it, Tlacaelel “was the instigator, the originator,
through wars [of the system] by which he made the great city of México Tenochtitlan
eminent and exalted” (35; trans. slightly altered for readability).
“In this Sun”: Anon. 1994:66. Experts dispute the verse structure in all these
poems.
“tortillas”: Durán 1994:231.
“moral combat”: León-Portilla 1963:216.
Cortés on sacrifice: Cortés 1986:35–36 (both quotes). See also, Durán 1994:406
(excitedly, raising the toll to “2,000, 3,000, 5,000, or 8,000 men” a day on special
occasions).
Denial of sacrifice: Hassler 1992; Moctezuma and Solis Olguín 2003 (indigenous
images of sacrifice). The anthropologist Michael Harner argued (1977) that the human
sacrifice and cannibalism of the Mexica were “natural and rational,” “the only possible
solution” (both 132) to supply protein to a dense population with no domesticated
animals. But the Mexica lived on a lake with abundant fish and aquatic life and also
obliged conquered peoples to ship them food (Ortiz de Montellano 1978). See also,
Graulich 2000.
European executions: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 2):516–18 (Tyburn, “the corpses,”
518); Pepys 1970 (vol. 5):21 Jan 1664 (“at least”).
English executions, population: Gatrell 1994:6–15; Wrigley 1983:121.
Nahuatl corpus: Frances Karttunen, pers. comm.
Tlamatinime: León-Portilla 1963:9–24, 62–81, 136 (quotes, 12–13).
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Nezahualcóyotl poems on mortality: Peñafield 1904, quoted in Sullivan and Knab
eds. 1994:163 (“Truly”—I slightly altered the first line to scan better); León-Portilla
1963:6 (“Do flowers”); 1992:81 (“Like a painting”); Nabokov 1989:19 (“brief crack”).
Nahuatl rhetoric: Author’s interviews, Karttunen; Garibay 1970:115.
Art and truth: León-Portilla 1963:71–79 (“nothing is ‘true,’” 73; “He goes,” 75;
“From whence,” 77).
Northwest Coast art: Jonaitis 1991:chaps. 1, 8.
Spanish reactions to Tenochtitlán: Díaz de Castillo 1975:214–19; Cortés
1986:102–12 (“can there,” 108–09; “obliterate,” 88).
Conquest of alliance and disease’s role: Thomas 1995. Crosby (1986:200) calls
Cortés’s victory “a triumph of the [smallpox] virus.” 143 Postconquest population
decline: Borah 1976; Borah and Cook 1964; Cook and Borah 1963 (25.2 million, 88);
Borah 1951; Cook and Simpson 1948. For postconquest epidemics in Mexico and New
Spain, see the thorough discussions in Prem 1992; N. D. Cook and Lovell 1992; the other
articles in N. D. Cook and Lovell eds. 1992; Malvido 1973. Cook and Borah’s estimate
was a best guess; more confidently, they argued that the precontact population was
between eighteen and thirty million.
“We, Christians”: Cieza de León 1959:62.
Holocaust and moral capital: Examples include Thornton 1987; Stannard 1992;
Churchill 1997. To be clear: Many of the books and articles that employ the term
“holocaust,” such as Russell Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival (1987),
are careful works of scholarship. But their authors wish also to make a political point, one
that in their view flows directly from their research. Sensitive to language, they have
selected a charged term to convey that point. For discussions of the moral capital that is
the reward of mass victimhood, see Stannard 2001; Alexander 1994:esp. 195.
“Very probably”: Katz 1994 (vol. 1):20 (emphasis in original).
“economic depression”: Borah 1951:27.
Holmes: Quoted in Stannard 1992:244.
Inadvertent subjugation: I made this argument myself in Chap. 2.
Siege of Kaffa: O’Connell 1989:171.
“And what was”: Churchill 2003:53.
“the Spaniards are”: Klor de Alva 1992:xx–xxi.
Díaz de Castillo: This line is not in any recent English translation, all of which are
abridged; it is the last sentence of chapter 174 in the Spanish original.
Argument in Spanish court: Detailed in Pagden 1990: Chap. 1.
Spanish view of sickness: Porter 1998; interviews, Crease, Denevan, Lovell.
Salomon: Salomon 1993.
Las Casas: Las Casas 1992b:28 (“beehive”), 31 (“twelve million”). See also,
Motolinía 1950:38–40.
Colonial accounts came to seem exaggerated: “Modern students commonly have
been inclined to discount early opinions of native numbers, but rarely specified their
reasons for doing so” (Sauer 1935:1). Responding to Sauer, the anthropologist Alfred L.
Kroeber simply said, without further explanation, “I am likely to reject most [sixteenthand
seventeenth-century documents] outright” (Kroeber 1939:180). See also, Cook and
Borah 1971 (vol. 1):376–410 (“Sixteenth-century,” 380).
Numbers creep down: Jennings 1975:16–20.
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Forty or fifty million: Spinden 1928:660 (50 to 75 million “souls” lost); Rivet,
Stresser-Pean, and Loukotka 1952 (40 to 45 million).
“Most of the arrows,” Henige’s estimate: Author’s interviews, Denevan, Henige.
“a very high population”: Zambardino 1978. Henige responded in Henige 1978a.
5 / Pleistocene Wars
Discovery of Lagoa Santa skeletons: Calogeras 1933 (reproducing Lund’s initial
letters of discovery); Mattos 1939. Lund and his successors did not well document their
initial location (Soto-Heim 1994:81–82; Hrdli ka et al. 1912:179–84).
Fifteen thousand years: Laming-Emperaire 1979. Other researchers got even older
dates, e.g., Prous 1986. Other very early Brazilian dates include Beltrão et al. 1986.
Morphology of skulls: Neves, Meyer, and Pucciarelli 1996; Soto-Heim
1994:86–103; Neves and Pucciarelli 1991; Beattie and Bryan 1984; Mattos 1946.
North American scoffing: One example: “These claims [of great antiquity] have
long been shown to be erroneous, although the proponents of early glacial humans in the
area remain vociferous” (Bruhns 1994:62). No citation for the refutation is provided.
Botocudos history: Wright and Carneiro de Cunha 2000; Paraíso 1999 (botoques,
423–24); Paraíso 1992:esp. 240–43 (“just war,” 241).
Botocudos’ purported similarity to Lagoa Santa Man: Interview, Pena; Soto-Heim
1994:84.
Two genomes: I borrow the phrase from Margulis and Sagan 2001. Margulis
pioneered the contemporary theory of the origin of mitochondria.
Human genome project: Genome International Sequencing Consortium 2001;
Venter et al. 2001. The announcement was in June 2000; publication followed seven
months later. These genome maps were preliminary; biologists put together a 99.9
percent complete picture only in 2003.
Mitochondrial genome project: Anderson et al. 1981.
Mitochondria in sperm: Gyllensten et al. 1991.
History of mtDNA research: Richards and Macaulay 2001.
Four haplogroups: Schurr et al. 1990; Horai et al. 1993; Torroni and Wallace
1995; Bandelt 2003. In 1998 scientists reported a fifth, very rare haplogroup. Also found
in Europe, it may be a legacy of Genghis Khan’s incursion (Brown et al. 1998).
Disdain for amateurs: As far back as 1893, William J. McGee reported with
satisfaction that the Anthropological Section of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science was refreshingly free “of those pseudoscientific
communications which tend to cluster about every branch of science in its formative
period…anthropology is rapidly taking form as an organized body of knowledge no less
definite than the older sciences” (McGee 1900:768).
Taino Letter, Columbus, C., to Santangel, L.D., 14 Mar. 1493, trans. A. B. Hart
and E. Channing, in Eliot ed. 1909–14, online at http://www.bartleby.com/43/2.htm.
Test of divinity: Benzoni 1857:77.
Motecuhzoma and Spanish “gods”: Restall 2003:108–20. For an example of the
story, see Prescott 2000:171–73; Tuchman 1984:11–14 (“wooden,” 14).
Northeast and supernatural powers: Trigger 1991.
Choctaw and Zuñi origins: Cushman 1999:199; Bunzel 1932.
“mountains of Ararat”: Genesis 8:4 (King James version).
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Christian befuddlement: Hallowell 1960.
José de Acosta wrestles with question: Acosta 2002:51–74 (“contradict Holy
Writ,” “Europe or Asia,” 61; “must join,” 63; refutation of Lost Tribes theory, 71–72).
Candidate ancestors: Wauchope 1962:3. The full list of candidates is even longer,
but some pride of place should be given to the Welsh, who have had a widespread
following for two hundred years. As Lewis and Clark began their journey across the
continent, Thomas Jefferson tried to put them in contact with a man who had come from
Wales to search for errant bands of Welsh-speaking white Indians (Letter, Jefferson, T.,
to Lewis, M., 22 Jan. 1804, available from the Library of Congress at
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mtj:@field(DOCID+@lit(je00060)). See
also, Williams 1949a, 1949b. In an earlier article (Mann 2002c), I incorrectly wrote that
Jefferson himself had instructed them to look for Welsh Indians.
Most widely accepted answer: Hrdli ka 1912 (“the most widespread theory, and
one with the remnants of which we meet to this day, was that the American Indians
represented the so-called Lost Tribes of Israel,” 3); Kennedy 1994:225–31 (Mormons);
Hallowell 1960:4–6 (Penn, Mather). See also, Parfitt 2002.
Lost Tribes of Israel: II Kings 17:4–24, 18:9–12 (“So was Israel,” 17:23); II (or
IV) Esdras 13:39–51 (“a distant land,” 42–48); Ezekiel 37:15–26 (“take the children,”
21); Jeremiah 13:11, 33:7–8. All quotes except Esdras from King James version; Esdras
is from New English Bible, as it is not in the King James version.
Ussher’s calculation: Ussher 1658:1 (23 Oct. 4004); 68 (721 b.c.).
Ussher’s authority: White 1898:Chap. 6 (“his dates”). One modern history says
that although few endorsed “the exact detail” of Ussher’s chronology, its precepts ruled
“general thought about man’s past” (Daniel and Renfrew 1986:22).
Discovery of European Pleistocene remains: Grayson 1983. I have simplified the
story somewhat. In 1858 British geologists, Sir Charles Lyell among them, unearthed
tools and Pleistocene fossils in an English cave. Twenty-one years before, Jacques
Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, a French customs officer and amateur scientist, had
made a similar but larger find near Abbéville, in northern France. His announcement was
met with ridicule, some of it from Lyell. A year after the British discovery, Lyell and
other scientists went to Abbéville, decided that Boucher de Perthes had been right all
along, and issued gracious public apologies. From that point on, the scientific consensus
was in favor of an early origin of humankind.
Abbott’s finds, proselytizing: Abbott 1876 (“driven,” 72); 1872a (“so primitive,”
146); 1872b.
Bureau of American Ethnology: Meltzer 1994; 1993:chaps. 3, 5; Judd 1967. The
Smithsonian’s brief history of the Bureau of American Ethnology is at
http://www.nmnh.si.edu/anthro/outreach/depthist.htm.
Holmes critique: Interview, Meltzer; Meltzer 1992; 1994:9–11; Hough 1933.
Abbott, McGee, and the Paleolithic Wars: Abbott 1892a (“The stones are
inspected,” 345); 1892b (“scientific men of Washington,” 270); 1883a (“high degree,”
303); 1883b (“more ‘knowing,’” 327); 1884 (“neither among,” 253); Meltzer 2003;
1994:11–12; 1993:41–50; Cultural Resource Group 1996.
Hrdli ka’s life work: Meltzer 1994:12–15; 1993:54 (“respectable antiquity”);
Montagu 1944; Loring and Prokopec 1994:26–42.
“favorable cave”: Quoted in Deuel 1967:486.
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Folsom: Meltzer 1994:15–16; 1993:50–54; Roberts 1935:1–5; Kreck 1999.
Brown’s announcement: Anon. 1928; Chamberlin 1928.
Whiteman: Anon. 2003; McAlavy 2003; Cotter and Boldurian 1999:1–10.
“driving mania”: Eiseley 1975:99.
Howard at Clovis: Cotter and Boldurian 1999:11–20 (“EXTENSIVE BONE,” 11;
“One greenhorn,” 14; 130ºF, 15); Anon. 1932; Howard 1935 (I thank Robert Crease for
helping me obtain this article).
Discovery of Clovis culture: Cotter 1937; Roberts 1937.
“So far”: Hrdli ka 1937:104. Other skeptics were less careful. Writing in 1933,
Walter Hough, of the U.S. National Museum, flatly claimed that “archaeologists now
agree that there are no American paleolithic implements” (Hough 1933:757).
Lack of skeletons: Interview, Petersen; Steele and Powell 2002 (ten skeletons);
Preston 1997:72 (interview with Owsley).
More than eighty Clovis and Folsom sites: Hannah Wormington lists ninety-six
sites in the 1957 edition of her well-regarded Ancient Man in North America. But she
describes some as small and uncertain, so I have hedged and said “more than eighty”
(Wormington 1957). Grayson and Meltzer (2002) tally seventy-six paleo-Indian sites in
the continental United States.
Cosmic-ray race: Crease and Mann 1996:Chap. 10.
Detection of organic C 14 and halflife: Anderson et al. 1947a, 1947b;
Engelkemeier et al. 1949.
First radiocarbon dates: Arnold and Libby 1949 (“seen to be,” 680); Marlowe
1999.
“You read books”: Libby 1991:600.
UA C 14 lab and Haynes’s background: Author’s interview, Haynes; Feldman
1998.
Consistency of C 14 dates: Haynes 1964.
13,500 and 12,900 years ago: I use the calibrations in Stuiver et al. 1998 (online at
http://depts.washington.edu/qil/datasets/intcal98_14c.txt.). These calibrations are
essentially applied to Clovis and Folsom in Fiedel 1999b:102. They have been attacked
as based on unreliable data (Roosevelt, Douglas, and Brown 2002; Roosevelt 1997).
Beringia: For a general physical description, see Fiedel 1992:46–47. Although
now a little dated, Fiedel’s book remains one of the best expositions of the basic issues.
Beringia insects: Elias 2001; Elias et al. 1996; Alfimov and Berman 2001;
Colinvaux 1996.
Temperature rise: Alley 2000.
Ice-free corridor and 1950s investigations: E.g., Elson 1957.
“ice-free” and “700 years”: Haynes 1964:1412. The potential relevance of the
ice-free corridor was first described in Johnston 1972:22–25, 44–45. I am grateful to Josh
d’Aluisio-Guerreri for helping me obtain this book.
Pleistocene bestiary: Anderson 1984; Kurtén and Anderson 1980.
11,500 and 10,900 B.C.: Corrected radiocarbon dates from unpublished data
provided to the author by Stuart Fiedel.
“zoologically impoverished”: Wallace 1962 (vol. 1):149–50.
Martin’s overkill thesis: Martin 1984, 1973 (“thoroughly superior predator,”
“swift extermination,” 972), 1967.
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Other extinctions: Wilson 1992:244–53.
“Paradigmatic image”: Fiedel 1992:63–84. The image is summed in Easton 1992
(“stout-hearted,” 31).
Northwest Coast salmon wars: Wilkinson 2000. The treaty language at issue
(“right of taking”) is in Article 3, http://www.nwifc.wa.gov/tribes/treaties/tmedcreek.asp.
Hrdli ka in Larsen Bay: Denny’s story can be augmented with the essays in
Bray and Killion eds. 1994. Larsen Bay was not an anomaly. In 1902 Hrdli ka visited
Sonora, Mexico, where Yaqui Indians were fighting the Mexican army. On a battlefield
Hrdli ka found sixty-four fresh Yaqui corpses—men, women, and children. He lopped
off their heads and shipped them to the Smithsonian (Hrdli ka 1904:65–66).
Fifty shot down: Cited in Meltzer 1995:22. “The shelf-life of pre-Clovis claims
seems little more than a decade,” Meltzer wrote (ibid.).
“Clovis police,” new Hrdli ka: Author’s interviews, Meltzer, Haynes, Thomas
Dillehay; Pringle 1999 (police); Alsoszatai-Petheo 1986:18 (new Hrdli ka); Meltzer
1989:478–79. Clovis-firsters were attacked as the “Clovis Mafia” (Koppel 2003:147–50).
Fiedel (2000:42–43) marshals evidence against the charges.
Landmark article: Greenberg, Turner, and Zegura 1986 (“the three,” 479; “we are
dealing,” “28 key,” “dental clusters,” 480; “widely held,” 484; “tripartite division,” 487).
Languages of California: Mithun 1997 (fifteen families); Kroeber 1903 (five
families).
180 language families: This rough figure for the linguistic state of the art in 1986
is created by adding together two then-recent tallies: Campbell and Mithun 1979 (62
families in North America) and Loukokta 1968 (118 in South and Central America).
Critiques of three-migrations paper: Campbell 1986 (“Neither,” “should be,”
488); Morrell 1990b (“zero”). See also, Campbell 1988; Laughlin 1986.
Geneticists pursued the question: Reviewed in Merriwether 2002.
Mitochondrial DNA indicates multiple migrations: Schurr et al. 1990; Horai et al.
1993.
Wallace and Neel timing estimate: Torroni et al. 1994.
Haplogroup A study: Bonalto and Bolzano 1997.
Size of founding groups: Schurr et al. 1990 (little mtDNA diversity, small group);
Ward et al. 1991 (much diversity, big group).
Diverse possible origins: Merriwether et al. 1996 (Mongolia); Karafet et al. 1999
(Lake Baikal); Torroni et al. 1993 (east Asia); Lell 2002 (southern middle Siberia and
Sea of Okhkotsk, in two major migrations).
“only one thing”: Cann 2001:1746.
Monte Verde: Meltzer 1997; Dillehay ed. 1989–97 (summary of dig history, vol.
2:1–24). See also Dillehay 2001; Gore 1997; Wilford 1998b, 1997b.
Dates: Dillehay ed. 1989–97 (vol. 1):18–19, 133–45, esp. Table 6.1. Dillehay did
not use calibrated radiocarbon dates; I use the calibration in Stuiver et al. 1998. Fiedel
says the likely occupation date is 13,500–14,100 years ago, if the data are correct (Fiedel
2000:50).
Hostility: Interviews, Crawford, Dillehay, Fiedel, Meltzer; Morrell 1990a:1.
Site visit to Monte Verde: Meltzer 1997; Adovasio and Page 2003:Chap. 9
(according to Meltzer, an accurate account [interview, Meltzer]); Gibbons 1997; Wilford
1997b (“ball game”). See also, Haynes 1999.
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Fiedel’s critique: Author’s interviews, Fiedel; Fiedel 1999a (“virtually every,” 1);
Pringle 1999. See also, in general, Haynes 2003.
Haynes’s misgivings: Haynes 1999 (“further testing”).
Corridor critics: Levson and Rutter 1996; Burns 1996; Catto 1996; Jackson,
Phillips, and Little 1999.
Lack of evidence in corridor: Driver 2001.
Critique of overkill: Grayson and Meltzer 2003 (“lives on,” 590).
Clovis-firsters in minority: Roosevelt, Douglas, and Brown 2002 (“[T]he tide of
public and scholarly opinion has definitely turned against Clovis as the earliest culture,”
159); Lynch 2001 (“Some of our,” 39; “blow the whistle,” “political correctness,” 41).
Three other pre-Clovis sites: Meadowcroft Rockshelter, in Pennsylvania,
excavated mainly by James Adovasio; Cactus Hill, in Virginia, excavated by Joseph
McAvoy; and Topper, in South Carolina, excavated by Allan Goodyear. See Adovasio
and Page 2003.
Kennewick Man: Chatters 2001; Thomas 2001. The European connection links to
Smithsonian archaeologist Dennis Stanford’s idea that the Clovis culture descended from
the Solutrean culture in Pleistocene Era France and Spain. Because Solutrean spear points
resemble Clovis points, Stanford has speculated that they wandered across a northern
arch of ice from Ireland to Greenland to northeast Canada, in an Atlantic version of the
passage through Beringia. Stanford’s Solutrean proposal was never published in scholarly
journals, though it was adumbrated in Newsweek and the New Yorker. Specialists in
Solutrean culture have not greeted these ideas with equal warmth (Stanford and Bradley
2002; Straus 2000; see also, Preston 1997; Begley and Murr 1999).
Baja skulls: González-José et al. 2003; Dillehay 2003.
Australians into Brazil: Mattos 1939:105–07.
Fladmark and coastal route: Fladmark 1979 (see references therein to earlier
papers); Mason 1894 (early proposal); Easton 1992; Koppel 2003:68–74; Powledge
1999; Hall 1999.
“Even primitive”: Quoted in Chandler 2002.
(Re)settlement of Europe: Tolan-Smith 1998; Rozoy 1998. Before the Ice Age,
northern Europe was populated, but there was no cultural continuity between the earlier
and later inhabitants.
6 / Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize
“weft-twining”: My thanks to Nobuko Kajitani and Masa Kinoshita for helping
me with textile terminology.
Huaricanga dig: Author’s interviews, Haas, Creamer, Ruiz, Gerbert Asencios,
Dan Corkill, Luis Huaman, Kit Nelson.
Discovery of Norte Chico: The ruins were first written up by Max Uhle
(1856–1944), a German researcher who is often called the “father of South American
archaeology” (Uhle 1925). For Uhle’s life and work, see Menzel 1977; Rowe 1954.
Among the world’s biggest buildings: Huaricanga was built before the Egyptian
pyramids, at a time when the only other structures that could be called monumental were
in the city-states of Sumer. But at the time even these were smaller than the Huaricanga
pyramid, so far as archaeologists can tell. The other main Eurasian culture centers—the
Indus Valley, the Nile Delta, and the Shang homeland in China—did not even have cities
326

then. Later the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the pyramids of Egypt surpassed the
Peruvian temples in size.
McNeill book: McNeill 1967.
High-school textbook: Stearns 1987 (“four initial centers,” 16; Indian history,
203–12). It was better than some other histories. A World History, by Mazour and People,
gave the Americas just five pages (281–86). R. J. Unstead’s History of the World devoted
three and a half pages to Indians: one and a half in the chapter “Other Cultures,” and two
pages in the chapter “Europeans in America” (Unstead 1983:58–59, 200–02).
Maize as most important crop: The 2001 maize harvest was 609 million metric
tons, whereas rice and wheat were 592 million mT and 582 million mT respectively.
Statistics from the FAO agricultural database are online at http://apps.fao.org/default.htm.
Three-fifths of the crops: Weatherford 1988:204.
Olmec as founder of Peruvian societies: This idea was common in the 1920s and
1930s (Wells 1920 [vol. 2]:189–90). Later it fell out of favor, though it continued to be
mooted until at least the 1960s (Coe 1962).
Sumer as world’s oldest city: Some densely populated settlements were older,
notably Çatalhöyük, in central Turkey, and ’Ain Ghazal, in Jordan. But archaeologists
believe that these were not true cities, because they show little evidence of public
architecture, strong social hierarchy, and division of labor (Balter 1998; Simmons et al.
1988).
Eurasian trade in ideas: Examples lifted from Teresi 2002.
Pan-American Highway: The roadless gap in Panama and Colombia, once quite
large, has shrunk to about fifty miles. Still, the road is so bad that the Lonely Planet
guidebook describes the Pan-American Highway as “more of a concept than an actual
route.”
Atacama as model for Mars: Navallo-González et al. 2003.
Pizarro’s pilot’s advice: Quoted in Thomson 2003:139.
Possible Paleo-Indian routes to coast: Arriaza 2001.
Two Science reports: Sandweiss et al. 1998; Keefer et al. 1998; deFrance et al.
2001. See also, Pringle 1998b; Wilford 1998a.
Different early adaptations: A fine summary is provided in Moseley 2001:91–100.
First finding of mummies: Max Uhle found the same mummies but didn’t further
excavate there (Uhle 1917). I am grateful to the librarians at Pontificia Universidad
Católica del Perú who hunted down this article for me.
Chinchorro diet: Aufderheide and Allison 1995. My thanks to Joshua
D’Aluisio-Guerreri for helping me obtain this article.
Chinchorro mummies: Arriaza 1995 (1983 find, chap. 2); Allison 1985; Pringle
1998a.
Anemia in child mummies: Focacci and Chacón 1989.
Tapeworm eggs: Reinhard and Urban 2003.
Import of Norte Chico: Author’s Interviews, Haas, Creamer, Ruiz, Mike Moseley.
Haas and Creamer 2004 (“The complex of sites,” 36); Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz, 2004.
Aspero: Willey and Corbett 1954 (“knolls,” 254); Moseley and Willey 1973
(“excellent, if embarrassing,” “temple-type,” 455); Feldman 1985; 1980:246 (rejecting
older dates), cited in Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz, 2004.
Caral: Shady Solis, Haas, and Creamer 2001; Shady Solis and Leyva eds. 2003;
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Shady Solis, pers. comm. See also, Pringle 2001; Sandweiss and Moseley 2001; Fountain
2001; Bower 2001; Ross 2002.
Dating of other Norte Chico sites: Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz 2004.
Egypt: For dates and sizes I have relied on Algaze 1993 and Spence 2000 (which
dates construction on the Great Pyramid of Khufu to begin in 2485–75 B.C.).
Invention of government: Author’s interviews, Haas, Petersen; Haas, Creamer,
and Ruiz 2004.
Cotton domestication: Sauer 1993.
Cotton in Europe and the Andes: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):325–27; (vol.
2):178–80 (bans, prostitutes), 312–13; Murra 1964.
MFAC hypothesis: Moseley 2005, 1975b. See the critiques in Wilson 1981,
Raymond 1981.
Work parties and music: Author’s Interviews, Haas, Creamer; Shady Solis 2003a,
2003b.
Champ de Mars: Schama 1989:504–09.
Early Staff God: Author’s interviews, Creamer; Makowski, pers. comm.; Haas
and Creamer, forthcoming; Spotts 2003; Makowski 2005.
Norte Chico as foundation: In the past anthropologists have sometimes tried to
describe Peruvian societies in terms of lo Andino, a being whose special characteristics
have uniquely defined those societies throughout time. I am arguing something different,
that people who have solved problems in one way will often return to those proven
methods to solve new ones.
Domestication of tobacco: Winter 2000.
Itanoní description, plans, history: Author’s interviews, Ramírez Leyva.
Uniqueness of Itanoní: Small tortillerías using local maize persist in rural Mexico,
although they are threatened by the industrial production of Maseca, the large,
state-affiliated maize and tortilla firm. By contrast, Itanoní is a boutique operation that
sells as many as eight different varieties of tortillas, each made from a separate local
cultivar. The difference is akin to the difference between an Italian village café that sells
liters of unlabeled local wine and an enoteca, a fine wine store featuring the carefully
labeled production of the region.
Millet as first cereal: Callen 1967.
Genetic similarity of cereals: Gale and Devos 1998.
Productivity of wild cereals: Zohary 1972; Harlan and Zohary 1966.
Teosinte: Author’s interview, Wilkes; Wilkes 1972, 1967 (I am grateful to Dr.
Wilkes for giving me copies of his work); Crosby 2003b:171 (nutritional value).
Wheat and barley nonshattering mutation: Zohary and Hopf 2000:29–30, 59–60;
Hillman and Davies 1990.
General maize history: Warman 2003; Anon. 1982 (“not domesticated,” 5).
Paleo-Indian agricultural development and MacNeish’s work: MacNeish 1967,
1964; Flannery and Marcus 2002. MacNeish died in 2001.
Long debate over origin of maize: Kahn 1985:3–82; Galinat 1992.
Mangelsdorf theory: Mangelsdorf, MacNeish, and Galinat 1964. Mangelsdorf
first proposed the extinct-wild-ancestor theory in Mangelsdorf and Reeves 1939. I am
grateful to Dr. Wilkes for lending me a copy of this document. See also, Mangelsdorf
1986.
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Beadle’s theory: Beadle 1939.
Caustic letters: E.g., the exchanges between Beadle and another Nobel-winning
biologist, Barbara McClintock, in 1972 (McClintock Papers, “Searching for the Origins
of Maize in South America, 1957–1981: Documents,” letters of 22 Jan.–24 Feb. 1972,
available online at http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/LL/Views/Exhibit/documents/origins.htm).
Iltis theory: Iltis 1983.
Teosinte-gamagrass theory and critiques: Eubanks 2001b (McClintock quotes,
509), 1997; Bennetzen et al. 2001.
Teosinte mutations: The development of three of these mutations is elucidated in
Jaenicke-Després 2003. See references therein for the discoverers of the genes.
Maize in a decade: Eyre-Walker et al. 1998. Essentially the team argued that in
ten years breeders with exactly the right teosinte variants could have created maize if they
were as systematic as modern breeders. One assumes that the actual development time
was longer.
Locus and timing of development of maize: MacNeish went back to his early
maize cobs with new tools and decided they dated to about 3500 B.C. (Farnsworth et al.
1985). Subsequently, researchers did the same for early maize cobs from nearby Oaxaca,
pushing back the date to about 4200 B.C. (Piperno and Flannery 2001; Benz 2001). Both
of these sites contained fully domesticated maize (Benz and Iltis 1990). Pope et al. found
teosinte pollen grains as early as 5100 B.C. in a wet Gulf Coast site where teosinte is not
native, suggesting that it was moved there from the highlands. By 4000 B.C. the pollen is
dominated by modern maize (Eubanks 2001a; MacNeish and Eubanks 2000; Pope et al.
2001).
“arguably man’s”: Federoff 2003.
Diversity of maize: Doebley, Goodman, and Stuber 1998. The reason for the
diversity is that the ancestor species were hyperdiverse (Eyre-Walker et al. 1998).
Aragón Cuevas research: Author’s interviews, Aragón Cuevas. The number of
landraces varies from study to study, because the term is not precisely defined. It is often
claimed that more than two hundred exist in Latin America (e.g., Wellhausen et al. 1957,
1952).
Five thousand cultivars: Author’s interview, Wilkes. This is a widely cited guess
by a distinguished researcher with long experience in the field.
Chamula statistics: Anon. ed. 1998a. The data are from 1991, the most recent year
for which census results are available.
Perales’s study: Author’s interview, Perales.
Milpa: Here I describe the Mesoamerican variant of an ideal. Milpa-style
agriculture occurs in much of South America, though centered often on potatoes or
manioc instead of maize. Even in Mesoamerica, plenty of actual milpas are nothing more
than maize fields, especially where farmers grow maize for the market. Subsistence-farm
milpas I have seen tend to be more diverse. Milpa cultivation is often
described—incorrectly, according to Wilkes (author’s interview)—as synonymous with
“slash-and-burn,” in which farmers clear small areas for short times and then let them go
fallow (e.g., the otherwise useful Ewell and Sands 1987). Slash-and-burn, though, is
generally a modern innovation (see chap. 9). A good description of the milpa is Wilken
1987. A classic early study is Cook 1921.
Green Revolution and milpa: Author’s interviews, Denevan, Hallberg, Perales,
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Wilkes (“most successful”), James Boyce; Mann 2004.
Abundance of wild wheat and barley: Harlan and Zohary 1966 (“square
kilometers,” “Over many thousands,” 1078).
“the key”: Coe 1968:26.
Kirkby’s estimate: Kirkby 1973.
Maize iconography: Fields 1994.
Maize in Europe: Crosby 2003b:180–81; Warman 2003: 97–111.
Pellagra in Europe, Goethe: Roe 1973; McCollum 1957:302; Goethe 1962:33–34;
Warman 2003:132–50.
Maize and slavery: Author’s interviews, Crosby; Crosby 2003b:186–88; 1994:24;
Warman 2003:60–65.
Oaxaca data: Anon. ed. 1998b:532–68. The data are from 1991, the most recent
year for which census results are available.
Estimated productivity of Green Revolution maize in Oaxaca: Author’s
interviews, Aragon Cuevas, James Boyce. The estimate is roughly confirmed by the
calculations of Ackerman et al. (2002:36) that “a 1 percent increase in use of improved
varieties was typically associated with an increase in yield of 0.037 tons/ha” and hence a
100 percent switchover is a jump of 3.7 tons/ha.
Economic problems of landrace maize in Oaxaca: Author’s interviews, Aragón
Cuevas, Bellon, Boyce, Hallberg, Ramírez Leyva, Wilkes.
7 / Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades
Stirling’s find of dated stela: Stirling 1939 (“knees,” “hurried,” 213), 1940a; Coe
1976b. Stirling’s position was held previously by William Henry Holmes, scourge of
amateur “relic hunters.” In his National Geographic article, Stirling says the first giant
head was discovered in 1858; others put the find at 1862 (Bernal 1969:29). Following an
earlier, mistaken understanding of the Mesoamerican calendar, Stirling believed that the
stela was earlier than now thought; I use the modern date. Because carbon-dating had not
yet been invented, he had the dates of Maya emergence wrong, too. Still, he was right to
be puzzled by the Olmec.
Second Veracruz trip, first Olmec article: Stirling 1940b (“designed,” “‘The
ticks,’” 312; “basic civilization,” 333; “mysterious,” 334).
The Olmec: Among the few general book-length overviews are Coe 1996
(especially valuable for its illustrations of Olmec art); Pina Chan 1989; and Bernal 1969
(1968), the last still surprisingly useful despite its age. All espouse the “mother culture”
view, which has come under increasing fire.
“enigmatic people”: Baird and Bairstow 2004:727. Similar language can be found
in the Eyewitness Travel Guide: Mexico (New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2003), 254.
These characterizations are common in the popular press (e.g., Stuart 1993a [“the Olmec
stand for many as a kind of ‘mother culture’ to all the civilizations that came after,
including the Maya and the Aztec,” 92]; Lemonick 1996 [“More than 1,500 years before
the Maya…, the mysterious Olmec people were building the first great culture of
Mesoamerica,” 56]).
Olmec emerge abruptly: Some researchers have hypothesized that Olmec society
was stimulated into existence by a migration from the Pacific coast, but recent ceramics
research in Veracruz casts doubt on this idea (Arnold 2003).
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“quantum change”: Meggers 1975:17.
“There is now little doubt”: Coe 1994:62.
Bad name: Bernal 1969:11–12. Actually, the name is even worse than I indicated.
“Olmec” doesn’t refer to a people, but to the political phenomenon that began and ended
with their cities. The people in those cities may still be around, but called something else.
Mixe-Zoquean: Campbell and Kaufman 1976.
Olmec rubber: Hosler, Burkett, and Tarkanian 1999; Rodríguez and Ortiz 1994.
1800 B.C.: Rust and Sharer 1988.
San Lorenzo: Coe and Diehl 1980; Cyphers ed. 1997.
Olmec theology: Reilly 1994.
Thrones changed into sculptures: Porter 1989.
Africa-Olmec and Shang-Olmec connection: For the Africa-Olmec connection,
see Barton 2001; Winters 1979; Van Sertima 1976. Van Sertima’s claims are attacked in
Haslip-Viera, Ortiz de Montellano, and Barbour 1997. For the Shang-Olmec connection,
see Xu 1996; Meggers 1975; Ekholm 1969. I am grateful to Mike Xu for sending me a
copy of his manuscript. Meggers was critiqued in Grove 1977 and responded in Meggers
1977.
Olmec sculptures of fetuses and pathological conditions: Tate and Bendersky
1999; Dávalos Hurtado and Ortiz de Zárate 1953. I am grateful to the Bancroft Library
staffers who went to considerable trouble to find the second article for me.
Olmec appearance: Bernal 1969:76–79.
Mirrors: Heizer and Gullberg 1981.
Destruction of sculptures: Grove 1981.
La Venta: Rust and Sharer 1988. A succinct description is in Bernal 1969:35–43.
“not only engendered,” “established the pattern”: Bernal 1969:188. A well-argued
contemporary version of this view is Diehl 2005.
Competitive interaction in Mesoamerica: Flannery and Marcus 2000 (“chiefdoms
in the Basin,” 33). I thank Joyce Marcus for walking me through these ideas.
Zapotec rise: Blanton et al. 1999; Marcus and Flannery 1996; Flannery and
Marcus 2003 (“virtually unoccupied,” 11802; radiocarbon dates, 11804); Spencer 2003.
Oldest writing: Marcus pers. comm. (750 B.C.), 1976 (glyphs and translation);
Flannery and Marcus 2003. See also, Serrano 2002. The reason I have called the temple
carving the first “securely” dated writing is that two other candidates for the title of first
written text exist, but neither can be dated accurately because their archaeological context
is unknown. Both are from the Tlatilco culture north of present-day Mexico City; they
may have been made as early as 1000 B.C. One seal shows three glyphs that some think
resemble Olmec writing. The other, a true mystery, bears what look like letters in a script
of which there are no other extant examples (Kelley 1966). A third candidate for earliest
Olmec writing exists. In the 1990s a team led by Mary Pohl of the University of Florida
discovered a cylindrical greenstone seal two miles from La Venta. Dated to 650 B.C., the
seal bears a bas-relief bird with a comic-book speech bubble bursting from its mouth.
Pohl and two colleagues identified the glyphs in the bubble as precursors to the Mayan
glyphs for the date 3-Ajaw (Pohl, Pope, and von Nagy 2002; Stokstad 2002). The
identification is controversial. The text cannot be Mayan, they say, because Maya
civilization was not firmly set in place until centuries later. Nor can it be Olmec, because
other Olmec texts seem not to be related to Maya glyphs. According to John Justeson, a
331

linguistic anthropologist at the State University of New York in Albany who has
deciphered other Olmec texts, “Although many accept the greenstone glyphs as plausibly
being writing, what [Pohl’s team] read as a ritual calendar date on the ceramic is scarcely
accepted by anyone” (email to author).
Inanna temple example: Urton 2003:15–16.
Zero as number: Teresi 2002:79–87 (GPA example, 80).
Tres Zapotes date: In fact, the initial 7 (the baktun figure) was missing, because
the stela was broken. Stirling guessed that it was a 7, a supposition that was proven
correct in 1972, when the other part of the stela was discovered (Cohn 1972).
Tentative assignation: In The Olmec World, for instance, Bernal never directly
says that the Olmec invented zero. He merely describes the Long Count, remarking that it
“necessarily implies knowledge of the zero” (Bernal 1969:114).
More than a dozen systems of writing: Coe 1976a:110ff. Coe lists thirteen forms,
but does not include Olmec and whatever is on the Tlatilco seals.
Deciphered Olmec stela: Stuart 1993a, 1993b; Justeson and Kaufman 1993; 1997;
2001 (Chiapas potsherd translation, 286).
Monte Albán dispute: I have borrowed the formulation in Zeitlin 1990. Some
argue that not enough data exist to resolve the question (O’Brien and Lewarch 1992).
Slabs as slain enemies: Marcus 1983:106–08, 355–60.
Fight with Tilcajete: Spencer and Redmond 2001.
N ˜udzahui marriage politics: Spores 1974.
8-Deer’s story: Pohl 2002; Byland and Pohl 1994:119–60, 241–44; Caso 1977–79
(vol. 1):69–83, (vol. 2):169–84; Smith 1962; Clark 1912.
Wheeled toys: Stirling 1940b:310–11, 314; Charnay 1967:178–86.
Egypt and wheel: Wright 2005:46.
Moldboard plow: Temple 1998 (“so inefficient,” 16). I am grateful to Dick Teresi
for directing me to this book and example (“as if Henry Ford”: e-mail, Teresi to author).
Lack of relation between technology and social complexity: I lift this point bodily
from Webster 2002:77. See also Ihde 2000.
Osmore Valley geography: I am grateful to Mike Moseley and Susan DeFrance
for guiding me through this area, and to Patrick Ryan Williams and Donna Nash for
showing me Moquegua and Cerro Baúl.
Wari and Tiwanaku: A succinct overview is La Lone 2000. Surprisingly little has
been written about Wari. Among the few recent books are Isbell and McEwan eds. 1991
and Schreiber 1992. The most widely cited recent works on Tiwanaku are Kolata 1993
and Kolata ed. 1996–2003. William Isbell has pointed out that the two names refer
simultaneously to cities, states, and religions. He has suggested that the Spanish names
Tiahuanaco and Huari be used for the physical ruins and the Aymara and Runa Suni
spellings Tiwanaku and Wari be used for these polities’ political and cultural styles
(Isbell 2001: 457).
Sixth-century climatic disaster: Fagan 1999:Chap. 7. The major apparent victims
were the Moche, who flourished in a three-hundred-mile strip along the northern coast
after 100 A.D. Drought put Moche society in crisis; El Niño rains led to floods that
destroyed entire villages and canal systems. El Niño also changed ocean current patterns
to deposit river sediments on the shore. These quickly turned to dunes, which winds blew
toward the Andes, threatening farmland. The Moche tried to regroup—and failed.
332

Potato’s advantages and status vis-a-vis maize: McNeill 1991, Murra 1960.
Wari religion: It should be emphasized that the common image of the Staff God
did not mean that the deity meant the same thing in every culture (Makowski 2001).
Terracing, arable land, abandonment: Peruvian ecologist Luis Masson has
estimated that 1.2 to 1.4 million acres was terraced on just the west side of the Andes, 75
percent of which is now abandoned (pers. comm., cited in Denevan 2001:173–75); Cobo
1990:213 (“flights of stairs”); Moseley 2001:230–38 (“patenting and marketing,” 233;
prospering of Wari despite climatic assault, 232).
Isbell-Vranich article: Isbell and Vranich 2004 (“repetitive,” 170).
Wari and Tiwanaku in Cerro Baúl: Interviews, DeFrance, Moseley, Nash,
Williams; Williams, Isla, and Nash 2001.
Geertz’s four states: Geertz 1980:121–22.
Chiripa: The major recent work on Chiripa is described in Hastorf 1999. A
summary is Stanish 2003:115–17.
Pukara: Stanish 2003:138–48, 156–60, 283–84. Stanish suggests that a drought
that began in about 100 A.D. may have induced Pukara’s collapse (157). But the drought
may not have occurred—its existence has been deduced from a study of Lake Titicaca
bottom sediments (Abbott et al. 1997). But the lake-sediment data, as the authors noted,
conflicted with previous ice-core studies; in addition, the depositional processes were
sufficiently poorly understood that one could not judge when the putative dry periods
began and ended.
Rise of Tiwanaku: Stanish 2003:chap. 8, 2001.
Tiwanaku as predatory state: Kolata 1993:81–86, 243–52 (“predatory,” 243;
“lower cost,” 245).
Akapana: Interviews, Nicole Couture, Michael Moseley, Alexei Vranich; author’s
visit; Cieza de León 1959:282 (“how human hands”); Kolata 1993:103–29. Wendell
Bennett excavated at Akapana in the 1930s, but the first major excavations at Tiwanaku
in general did not occur until the late 1960s, with the work of researchers from the
Instituto Nacional de Arqueología de Bolivia, led by Carlos Ponce Sanginés. Ponce’s
work has come under fire, because he published little of his data and because he
“restored” Tiwanaku landmarks inaccurately. In the 1980s Alan Kolata of the University
of Chicago led a large team that produced the first comprehensive overview of the city
and its environs.
Kalasasaya and Gateway of the Sun: Author’s interviews, Couture, Vranich;
Kolata 1993:143–49.
Isbell-Vranich vision of city: Isbell and Vranich 2004.
Lack of markets: Kolata 1993:172–76 (“a city was,” “symbolically,” 173).
Vranich picture of Tiwanaku: Interviews, Vranich; Vranich 2001; Vranich et al.
2001:150–52; Isbell and Vranich 2004.
Cerro Baúl final days: Interviews, deFrance, Moseley, Nash, Williams; Moseley
et al. 2005 (“was likely,” “Later,” 17268).
Chimor history: Sakai 1998; Moseley and Cordy-Collins eds. 1990.
Chimor irrigation and canal: Denevan 2001:152–57. Some scholars attribute the
uphill sections to tectonic uplift; Denevan finds the regularity of the error difficult to
reconcile with tectonic causes (156).
Layout of Chan Chan: Shimada 2000:esp. 102; Moseley 1975a.
333

Fall of Chimor and execution of Qhapaq Yupanki: Sarmiento de Gamboa
2000:102–03; Rowe 1946:206.
Chimor and Thupa Inka: Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1999:72–73, 77–79;
Sarmiento de Gamboa 2000:102–03, 112–15.
Nazca lines: The original report, which I have not seen, is Mejía Xesspe 1940.
Von Däniken’s claims are found in, among many other titles, Von Däniken 1969, 1998.
Calendrical and astronomical theories are (to my mind) convincingly dismissed in
Morrison and Hawkins 1978. The best explanation I know of the current
geology-and-water hypothesis is Aveni 2000. For a variant, see Proulx, Johnson, and
Mabee 2001.
Moche: Bawden 1996; Uceda and Mujica eds. 1993. Research on the Moche was
greatly stimulated by the discovery of relatively untouched, art-filled tombs in Sipan in
1987. (Accounts of the efforts by Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva to save the site’s
artifacts from looters, include Kirkpatrick 1992 and Atwood 2004.) Since Sipan, much
research on the Moche has focused on their art—understandably so, given its high quality
(e.g., Alva and Donnan 1993).
Chavín de Huantar: Author’s visit; Burger 1992; Lumbreras, González, and
Lietaer 1976 (roaring sounds); Lumbreras 1989; Rowe 1967.
8 / Made in America
Chak Tok Ich’aak’s life and death: Stuart 2000; Schele and Mathews 1998:75–79;
Martin and Grube 2000:28–29 (portrait reproduced on 28, “entered the water,” 29);
Harrison 1999:71–81. See also Stone 1989.
The four cities are Palenque (Martin and Grube 2000:156), La Sufricaya
(Estrada-Belli 2002), El Perú and Uaxactun (Martin and Grube 2000:28–29).
“No words”: Webster 2002:7.
Uniqueness of collapse: Interviews and e-mail, Turner; Turner 1990.
Morley’s theory: Morley 1946:262. The earliest version of the
ecological-overshoot theory I know of is Cooke 1931. Cooke claimed that overexpansion
of agriculture had caused erosion that filled up Maya water reservoirs.
Pollen studies: Vaughan, Deevey, and Garett-Jones 1985; Deevey et al. 1979.
Environmental degradation, deforestation, floods: Binford et al. 1987; Abrams
and Rue 1988; Woods 2003. I am grateful to Prof. Woods for sending me a copy of his
article.
Deforestation-induced spiral to collapse: Santley, Killion, and Lycett 1986.
Drought: Curtis and Hodell 1996 (“Our findings suggest a strong relationship
between times of drought and major cultural discontinuities in Classic Maya civilization,”
46). See also, Hodell, Curtis, and Brenner 1995.
Green parable: See, e.g., Catton 1982; Lowe 1985; Lutz 2000 (“Environmentalists
concerned about the rapid growth of world population repeatedly cite the Maya collapse
as an example of what happens if a region’s population growth exceeds its population
carrying capacity,” vii); Ponting 1991 (“The clearest case of environmental collapse
leading to the demise of a society comes from the Maya,” 78); Diamond 2004: 157–77;
Wright 2005: 94–106 (Maya collapse shows that “civilizations often behave like
‘pyramid’ sales schemes, thriving only when they grow,” 83). Part of the appeal, one
assumes, is that the Maya fall (like that of Cahokia, which I cover later) was not due to
334

Europe.
“were able to,” “Are contemporary”: Ponting 1991:83; 1990:33.
Examples of spiritual books: Grim 2001; Berkes 1999; McGaa 1999; Durning
1992.
Five Great Values: Derived from Reiten 1995. Reiten, an administrator in a
Bureau of Indian Affairs school in New Mexico, gave her list to Tony Sanchez, of
Oakland State University, who revised it to broaden the values’ applicability from the
Lakota to all Indians—implicitly, and one assumes benevolently, asserting that all
indigenous peoples thought alike, thus denying their intellectual and cultural diversity. I
quote from Dr. Sanchez’s revised version (Sanchez 2001:420–21).
Van der Donck: Shorto 2004; Van der Donck 1841 (“all free by nature,” 207;
“They remark,” 210; “woods, plains and meadows,” 150–51; “several hundred miles,”
138).
“Such a fire”: Van der Donck 1993:n.p. (“Of the Wood, the Natural Productions
and Fruits of the Land”). I use this translation here because it is more evocative.
The following discussion of the natural role of fire draws from Mann and
Plummer 1995:89–92; Mt. St. Helens from author’s visits.
Nature not in lockstep: Botkin 1990; Pickett and Thompson 1978.
Ecological role of fire: Wright and Heinselman 1973; Komarek 1965 (“The
earth,” 204).
Fire and landscape management: Pyne 1982:71–81 (Lewis and Clark, 71–72;
Jefferson, 75); Day 1953:334–39; Williams 1989:47–48; Williams 2002; Cronon
1983:48–52; Morton 1637:52–54 (“to set fire,” 52). The impact of fire varied; in
Martha’s Vineyard, for instance, it seems to have been negligible (Foster et al. 2002).
Carriages in Ohio: Bakeless 1961:314, cited in Denevan 1992a:369.
“could be”: Wroth ed. 1970:139. See also, Higginson 1792: 117–18 (reporting
“thousands of acres of ground as good as need to be, and not a tree in the same”).
Smith’s gallop: Smith 1910 (vol. 1):64. He also saw Indians hunting with fire
(70).
Bison range: Roe 1951; Mathiessen 1987:147–52; Cronon 1983: 51–52 (“were
harvesting”).
Impact of Native American burning: Pyne 1982:71–83; Little 1974; Dorney and
Dorney 1989; Delcourt et al. 1986; Rostlund 1957a, 1957b.
Great Plains and anthropogenic fire: Axelrod 1985; Steuter 1991; Sauer 1975;
Williams 1989:46–48; Lott 2002:86–88 (“When Lewis and Clark,” 88).
Fidler’s fires: Fidler 1992 (“Grass all,” “Not a,” “All burnt,” “the grass,” 13–15;
“The Grass,” 36; “very dangerous,” 59).
Return of forest to Midwest: Williams 1989:46 (Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas,
Nebraska); Fisher, Jenkins, and Fisher 1987 (Wyoming); author’s visit, Texas (displays
of historical photographs).
“disastrous habit”: Palliser 1983:30.
Raup: Raup 1937 (“have been,” 84; “inconceivable,” 85).
“It is at least”: Brown and Davis 1973:116, quoted in Williams 2002:183.
Vale: Vale 2002 (“modest,” 14); 1998. Vale was rebutted in Keeley 2002. An
example of how natural scientists continue to dismiss the human presence is Hillspaugh,
Whitlock, and Bartlein 2000 (examining long-term fire frequency at Yellowstone
335

National Park, an area inhabited for thousands of years, “offers a natural ‘experiment’
that allows us to consider the sensitivity of fire regimes to climate change alone,” 211
[emphasis added]).
Cahokia description: Author’s visit; author’s interviews, Woods; Dalan et al.
2003:64–78.
Biggest population concentration: Iseminger 1997, cited in Woods 2004:152.
Controversy over mound origins: Silverberg 1968 (Bancroft, 98); Garlinghouse
2001; Kennedy 1994:230–39; Jefferson 1894:query XI (excavation of “barrow”).
Ouachita mounds: Saunders 1997; Pringle 1997 (“I know it,” 1762). The mounds
no longer overlook the river, which has changed its course since their construction.
Origins and rise of eastern North American agriculture: Smith 1993 (“the
indigenous crops in question,” 14), 1989. See the similar early argument in Linton
1924:349.
Eastern Agricultural Complex: More formally, the Eastern Agricultural Complex
consists of squash (Cucurbita pepo); marshelder or sumpweed (Iva annua); erect
knotweed (Polygonum erectum); maygrass (Phalaris caroliniana); common sunflower
(Helianthus annuus); little barley (Hordeum pusillum); and lambsquarter, aka chenopod
or goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri). Marshelder, like sunflower, has an edible, oily
seed. Erect knotweed is a low plant with starchy, edible seeds; it is not the invasive
Japanese knotweed that is a problem in the eastern United States. The grain from
maygrass and little barley, both knee-high grasses with tufted stalks, was probably dried
and pounded into flour. Lambsquarter is a spinach-like green that unfortunately looks like
the toxic western black nightshade.
Hopewell culture: Woodward and McDonald 2002; Romain 2000; Seeman 1979.
For the bow and arrow, see Browne 1938. Browne’s long-accepted argument that the
bow and arrow arrived relatively late has recently been challenged (Bradbury 1997) and
reaffirmed (Boszhardt 2002).
Hopewell religion: Brown 1997.
“stunning vigor”: Silverberg 1968:280–89.
Cahokia chronology: There are many versions of Cahokian chronology, because
the radiocarbon calibrations have been revised repeatedly, but they differ more in detail
than in substance. I use the chronology in Dalan et al. 2003:69. But see also Fowler 1997:
Appendix 1.
London population: Weinreb and Hibbert eds. 1993:630–32.
Cahokia not a city: Woods and Wells 2001.
Big Bang: Pauketat 1994:168–74. Pauketat himself did not use the term “Big
Bang,” though it is now in common use.
Synchrony and proximity of mound sites: Emerson 2002.
Engineering of Monks Mound: Woods 2001, 2000. My thanks to Ray Mann for
help in understanding the engineering and to Dr. Woods for a copy of these and other
papers.
Pauketat’s model: Pauketat 1998; 1997:30–51; 1994:esp. chap. 7.
Burials in small mound: Fowler et al. 1999.
Slow introduction of maize: Riley et al. (1994) dated maize found near Cahokia
from 170 B.C.–60 A.D.
Maize not important to Hopewell: interviews, Woods; Lynott et al. 1986.
336

Woods’s model of Cahokia fall: Author’s Interviews, Woods; Woods 2004, 2003;
Woods and Wells 2001. In its basics, this scenario is similar to that in Mehrer 1995:esp.
Chap. 5.
Widespread land clearing: Lopinot and Woods 1993.
Sedimentation evidence for flooding: Holley and Brown 1989, cited in Woods
2004:155; Woods 2003. See also, Holden 1996, Neumann 2002:150–51.
Haudenosaunee villages: Day 1953:332–34 (six square miles, Denonville, 333;
“hundreds of acres,” 338).
American chestnuts: Kummer 2003; Mann and Plummer 2002.
“They pound them”: Bartram 1996:56. For many groups in the Southeast, milk
from mast was the only kind of milk available.
Lack of evidence for deaths or hunger: Milner 1992.
Palisade: Iseminger 1990. In a novel interpretation, Pauketat argues that the
Cahokians’ attempt to shut themselves behind a palisade actually could have been “an
offensive tactic” that let Cahokia’s rulers “project a larger-than-normal armed force by
freeing up people who otherwise would have guarded the capital” (Pauketat 1998:71).
Status gap: Trubitt 2000.
1811–12 earthquakes: Nuttli 1973. According to Nuttli’s estimates, which are
based on multiple historical accounts, the earthquake was so powerful that ten miles away
from the fault it apparently kicked the ground up at a foot per second, enough to shotput
people into the air (table 7). Cahokia, 140 miles away from the center of the 1811
earthquakes, would not have experienced such drastic shaking, but because the soft
Mississippi soils readily transmit earthquake waves the impact would still have been
devastating.
Lack of Calakmul investigation: Strictly speaking, this isn’t true. Two Carnegie
Institution archaeologists visited Calakmul several times after a Carnegie botanist
reported its existence, but the site was so remote that they did little other than map the
central area (Lundell 1934; Ruppert and Denison 1943).
Calakmul description: Folan 1992; Folan et al. 1995, 2001.
Calakmul population: Culbert et. al. (1990) estimated the population of the entire
Mutal (Tikal) city-state at 425,000. Fletcher and Gann (1992) used the same methods for
Calakmul, concluding that Calakmul was 37 percent bigger than its rival (see also Folan
1990:159). The resultant population would be 582,250, which I have rendered as 575,000
to maintain a similar level of approximation.
Stuart’s work: Stuart 2000. Tatiana Prouskouriakoff and Clemency Coggins
suggested the outlines of the encounter in the 1960s, but later archaeologists rejected the
idea of an actual intrusion from Teotihuacán, instead arguing that the evidence suggested
an influx of ideas, rather than people. Stuart marshaled enough data to convince most of
his colleagues that Prouskouriakoff and Coggins were right to begin with.
Mutal-Kaan war: Martin and Grube 1966. I thank Prof. Grube for sending me a
copy of this widely cited and influential work. A recent summary is in Martin and Grube
2000. See also, Martin 2000.
Beginning of Kaan: Folan et al. 1995:325–30 (discussion of chronology).
Views of Maya state organization: Fox 1996. The most prominent early advocate
of the small-equal-state position was Morley (Morley 1946:50, 159–61). In the more
recent past it was adopted by such prominent Mayanists as Peter Mathews (1991),
337

Stephen Houston (1993), Nicholas Dunning (1992), and William Sanders and David
Webster (1988). The most widely cited dissent to the small-state view that I know of
came from Joyce Marcus, who argued for four dominant centers in several publications
(e.g., Marcus 1973). An unpublished but widely circulated analysis by Martin and Grube
(1996) changed many minds (see also, Grube and Martin 1998). I thank Prof. Grube for
sending me copies of both. The most accessible summary of their views is Martin and
Grube 2000:17–21.
Semblance of empire: This is a revamped version of a sentence in Chase, Grube,
and Chase 1991:1.
Decipherment of y-ahaw: Usually credited to Houston and Mathews 1985:27;
Bricker 1986:70.
“The political landscape”: Martin and Grube 2000:21. Martin’s comparison of the
Maya to the Greeks comes from interviews and email.
Sky Witness: Martin and Grube 2000:90–92, 102–04.
Mutal size and population: Adams and Jones 1981:318–19; Culbert et al. 1990
(arguing for 425,000 as total size).
Possible motives for Kaan-Mutal war: Fahsen 2003 (trade routes); Harrison
1999:121 (commerce, dynasty); Grube, pers. comm. (ideology).
Landscape alteration: The literature is vast. Examples include Darch 1988;
Dunning et al. 2002; Fedick and Ford 1990; Gunn et al. 2002 (“geochemically hostile,”
313); Scarborough and Gallopin 1991; Sluyter 1994. See also, Scarborough 2003.
Oxwitza’ (Caracol): Chase and Chase 2001, 1996, 1994 (population, 5).
Star Wars attack on Mutal: Harrison 1999:122; Houston 1991; Freidel 1993. The
Chases are skeptical of Kaan’s role, because they think it too far from Caracol and
because they are skeptical about the translations by Grube and Martin (Chase and Chase
2000:63).
Maya way of conquest: Grube and Martin 1998.
Dos Pilas: Guenter 2003; Fahsen 2003. Previous attempts at decipherment include
Boot 2002a, 2002b; better readings of the glyphs led to corrections. See also, Guenter
2002; Williams 2002.
Stairway quotes: Guenter 2002:39 (flint), 27 (skull).
Morley’s tally of dates: Morley 1946:64. Updated in Sidrys and Berger 1979;
Hamblin and Pitcher 1980. I use Sidrys and Berger. A few hard-to-read inscriptions
might have been set down as late as 928.
Four lines of evidence: Robichaux 2002 (waterflow evidence); Gill 2000
(ethnohistorical [Gill also uses many other types of data]; “starvation and thirst,” 1);
Curtis, Hodell, and Brenner 1996 (oxygen data; “driest intervals,” 45); Haug et al. 2003
(titanium).
Paradoxical survival in the north: Dahlin 2002 (“How and why,” 327); Robichaux
2002. The Maya also fled west, toward Guatemala’s Pacific coast, another dry area in
which they thrived during the drought. I leave the western cities out of the main account
solely for simplicity.
Chichén Itzá: Milbrath and Peraza Lope 2003.
9 / Amazonia
Orellana’s expedition: The main sources are collected in Heaton ed. 1934 (“by
338

God,” 262). The best histories of the expedition that I have come across are Smith
1990:chap. 2; Hemming 1987:185–94. Still enjoyable to read, though dated, is Prescott
2000 (“Not a bark,” 1075).
Orellana’s betrayal: The case for the prosecution is summed up in Means 1934.
For Pizarro’s reaction, see letter, Pizarro, G., to king, 3 Sept. 1542, in Heaton
1934:245–51 (“the greatest cruelty,” 248).
“We were eating”: Heaton ed. 1934:408.
Angry hives: I have borrowed the simile from Smith 1990:68. The next two
sentences are essentially reworkings of his sentences.
Carvajal on populousness, Tapajós attacks: Heaton 1934 (“farther we went,” 202;
“all inhabited,” “five leagues,” 198; “numerous and very large,” 200; “Inland,” 216;
“more than twenty,” 203).
Carvajal publication: Medina ed. 1894.
Carvajal criticism: López de Gómara 1979:131 (“mentirosa”); Myers et al. 1992;
Denevan 1996a:661–64; see also, Shoumatoff 1986. Oddly, critics rarely mention that
Orellana’s account is similar to those from the second Amazon expedition. This was the
Pedro de Orsua expedition of 1559–61, subject of the Werner Herzog film Aguirre, the
Wrath of God. The basic sources are collected in González and Tur eds. 1981. It stopped
at the Tapajós in 1561, but provided little further information about the region, except for
the suggestive fact that the Indian towns’ streets were laid out in a grid and that they had
wooden temples with deities painted on the doors (González and Tur eds. 1981:111, 370).
Ecologists’ views: Arnold 2000. For how they fit into the general Western
propensity to view the Amazon as a tropical Eden, see Holanda 1996; Slater 1995; and
the polemical Stott 1999. German ecologist Andreas Schimper invented “tropical rain
forest” as a scientific construct in 1898 (Schimper 1903). It was an example of a new
scientific category that included the living community and its nonliving environment
together as a single functioning unit—an ecosystem, a term Schimper’s school coined in
1935.
More sympathetic views of Carvajal: Author’s intervews, Balée, Erickson, Peter
Stahl, Anna Roosevelt. See also, Porro 1994, Whitehead 1994, for contemporary
treatments of early accounts.
Must become priority: E.g., “The time bomb of ecological, environmental,
climatic and human damage caused by deforestation continues to tick, and the problem of
tropical rainforest clearance must remain a priority within international politics” (Park
1992:162).
“A ceaseless round”: Belt 1985:184; Darwin ed. 1887 (vol. 3):188 (“best of all”).
Richards: Richards 1952. Richards’s ideas drew heavily on the idea of the natural
progression of ecosystems toward a final, stable “climax” developed by ecologists
Frederick E. Clements and Arthur George Tansley. In this view, the tropical forest was
the climax, the ultimate vegetative destination, in hot, humid areas.
“wet desert”: The image of the Amazon as a lush forest growing on a desert was
apparently popularized in Goodland and Irwin 1975.
Rainforest soils: This argument is crisply stated in Wilson 1992:273–74.
Counterfeit Paradise: Meggers 1996 (orig. ed., 1971).
Slash-and-burn as ecologically sensitive response: Interviews, Meggers; Meggers
1996: 20–23. See also, Kleinman, Bryant, and Pimentel 1996; Luna-Orea and Wagger
339

1996.
Unchanged harmony: “In the Western imagination, more generally speaking, the
Amazon has stood for centuries as the benchmark of primordial (pure) nature and as a
refuge of ‘primitive’ peoples: our contemporary ancestors” (Heckenberger, forthcoming).
Yanomamo as windows into the past: E.g., Brooke 1991 (“a tribe virtually
untouched by modern civilization whose ways date from the Stone Age”); Chagnon
1992. In the foreword to the latter, Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson calls the
Yanomamo “the final tribes living strong and free in the style of the preliterate peoples
first encountered by Europeans five centuries ago.” To Wilson, “the Yanomamö way of
life gives us the clearest view of the conditions under which the human mind evolved
biologically during deep history”(ix).
“mega-Niño events”: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Meggers 1994; 1979 (other
climatic constraints).
El Niño fires: Cochrane and Schulze 1998; Pyne 1995:60–65. Fires from a big El
Niño in 1925–26 were described in a short, apparently self-published monograph by
Giuseppe Marchesi (Marchesi 1975) that I found in a used-book store in Manaus.
According to Marchesi, the fires on the Río Negro were so intense that the smoke
blocked out the sun in Manaus, hundreds of miles away.
Recovery time of forest: Uhl 1987; Uhl and Jordan 1984; Uhl et al. 1982.
Upper limit of a thousand: Meggers (1954) says that the rainforest will not permit
societies to surpass the “Tropical Forest” pattern of slash-and-burn subsistence (809),
which she defines as “villages of 50–1,000 pop[ulation]” (814, fig. 1). The implication is
that environmental limits set the maximum village population at one thousand.
Meggers dismisses Carvajal: Meggers 1996:187 (“Evidence [of environmental
limits] casts doubt on the accuracy of the early European descriptions of large sedentary
populations along the floodplain”). Oddly, Meggers endorsed Carvajal in the same book
(“These eyewitness reports of numerous large villages are substantiated by archaeological
evidence,” 133). See also, Meggers 1992a, 1992c.
Unchanged lives, population: Meggers 1992 (two thousand years, 199).
Meggers and Marajó: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Popsin 2003; Meggers and
Evans 1957. See also Schaan 2004.
Meggers’s law: Meggers 1954 (“There is a force,” 809; “level to which,” 815).
Meggers called the stage of slash-and-burn cultivation the “Tropical Forest” pattern. In
the brackets, I have replaced references to that term. Her law drew on the
environmental-determinist arguments of earlier geographers such as Ellen Churchill
Semple, whose Influences of Geographic Environment trained two generations of
researchers: “The geographic element in the long history of human development has been
operating strongly and operating persistently…[and] is for all intents and purposes
immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic,
progressive, retrogressive man” (Semple 1911:2).
Marajó as offshoot: Meggers and Evans 1957:412–18. See also, Evans and
Meggers 1968. Meggers and Evans were influenced by Julian Steward, editor of the
influential Handbook of South American Indians, who also thought that Marajóara culture
originated somewhere else—the Caribbean, he suspected (Steward 1948).
Diminishing influence: “Few contemporary scholars accept the hypothesis of
environmental limitations and lack of cultural development in the Amazon Basin”
340

(Erickson 2004:457).
“Rather than admiration”: Cunha 1975:1. I thank Susanna Hecht for letting me
use her translation, which is from her forthcoming compilation of da Cunha’s Amazonian
writings. In the meantime, the original version of this marvelous book can be found at
http://www.librairie.hpg.com.br/Euclides-da-Cunha-A-Margem-da-Historia.rtf.
Not a disaster: I paraphrase anthropologist Roland Bergman (Bergman 1980:53,
quoted in Denevan 2001:60).
Rock paintings: Author’s visit; Consens 1989.
Roosevelt reexcavates: Author’s interviews, Roosevelt; Roosevelt 1991
(“outstanding indigenous,” 29; “100,000,” 2).
Earlier challenges to Meggers: Author’s interviews, Balée, Denevan, Erickson,
Peter Stahl, Woods. Donald Lathrap of the University of Illinois (1970), Michael Coe of
Yale (1957), and Robert L. Carneiro of the American Museum of Natural History in New
York City (1995, see refs.) mounted the most important ones.
Meggers reaction: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Meggers 1992b (“polemical,”
399; “extravagant,” 403). See also Meggers 2004, 2001.
Montaigne: Montaigne 1991:233–36.
“forest animals”: Condamine 1986, quoted in Myers et al. 2004:22.
“Where man has remained”: Semple 1911:635. The ideas in Influences of
Geographic Environment were typical for their day. “The Amazon winds its slow way
amid the malarious languor of vast tropical forests in which the trees shut out the sky and
the few natives are apathetic with the eternal inertia of the hot, damp tropics,” Semple’s
Yale contemporary, Ellsworth Huntington, wrote in 1919 (Huntington 1919:49). “It is
generally agreed,” Huntington said, “the native races within the tropics are dull in
thought and slow in action. This is true not only of the African Negroes, the South
American Indians, and the people of the East Indies, but of the inhabitants of southern
India and the Malay peninsula” (Huntington 1924:56). See also, Taylor 1927.
Meggers-Roosevelt dispute: Author’s interviews, Meggers, Roosevelt, Balée,
Denevan, Erickson; Meggers 1992a:37 (colonialism, elitism); Baffi et al. 1996 (CIA
membership).
Painted Rock Cave excavations: Roosevelt et al. 1996; Fiedel et al. 1996; Haynes
et al. 1997. Press coverage was unusually thorough. (Gibbons 1996; Wilford 1997a; Hall
1996). In Science, Roosevelt presented her estimate of initial occupation as
[.similar]11,200 to 10,500 uncalibrated radiocarbon years B.P. (380); I converted the
mean, 10,600 B.P., into calendar years with Stuiver et al. 1998.
Contemporaneity with Clovis: This is subject to debate, with Clovis-firsters
challenging Roosevelt’s earliest radiocarbon dates, and Roosevelt crying foul because (in
her view) the Clovisites apply more stringent standards to challengers than they do to
Clovis (Haynes et al. 1997). Further confusing the issue is the participants’ disagreement
over the best way of calibrating raw radiocarbon dates from this period.
138 crops: Clement 1999a, 1999b.
Stone axes: Author’s interviews, Denevan; Denevan 1992b. I am grateful to Prof.
Denevan for sending me a copy of this article, upon which my discussion of stone axes is
based. See also the updated version of the argument in Denevan 2001:116–23. To some
extent, Denevan was anticipated by Donald Lathrap, who called slash-and-burn “a
secondary, derived, and late phenomenon within the Amazon Basin,” which only made
341

economic sense after the introduction of maize (quoted in ibid.:132). Denevan argued for
a much later, post-1492 introduction of slash-and-burn.
Experiments with stone and steel axes: Carneiro 1979a, 1979b; Hill and Kaplan
1989 (difference between hardwoods and softwoods). True, Carneiro’s workers had no
experience with stone axes, which one assumes unfairly magnified their inefficiency. But
Carneiro also did not include the effort required to obtain the stone (often far away),
make the ax, and keep it sharp, all of which were time sinks. Girdling, too, has been
suggested, but it is also very slow.
Three years: Beckerman 1987. I thank Prof. Brush for helping me get this book.
Yanomamo history: Author’s interviews, Balée, Petersen, Chagnon.
Yanomami and steel tools: Author’s interview, Ferguson; Ferguson 1998
(lifestyle changes, 291–97), 1995; Colchester 1984 (seventeenth-century change,
308–10). Ferguson’s thesis is disputed, in part because it downplays the antiquity of
Yanomamo warfare (author’s interview, James Petersen).
Controversy on Yanomami gifts: These and other charges were publicized and
amplified in Tierney 2000. Tierney’s charges of exacerbating epidemics seem to have
been refuted (see note to p. 102), but the furor over them obscured discussion of
uncontrolled gifts of steel tools (Mann 2001, 2000a).
Absence of slash-and-burn in North America: Doolittle 2000:174–90
(“gossamer,” 186; “once fields,” 189).
Small farmer slash-and-burn as contributor to deforestation: Author’s interviews,
Clement, Fearnside; Fearnside 2001. Fearnside’s figure is a step down from the estimate
that slash-and-burn was responsible for 55 percent of total tropical forest clearing in the
Americas in Hadley and Lanly 1983.
Nutrient loss: Hölscher 1997. I thank Beata Madari for giving a copy of this
article to me.
Meggers survey: Meggers et al. 1988; Meggers 1996:183–87.
Central Amazon archaeology: Author’s interviews, Bartone, Heckenberger,
Neves, Petersen; Heckenberger, Petersen, and Neves 2004; Neves et al. 2004; Mann
2002a. I convert uncalibrated radiocarbon years as per Stuiver et al.1988. The site
discussed here is called Hatahara, after its owners.
Rainfall and canopy: Brandt 1988.
Importance of agroforestry: Interviews, Clement. See also, Denevan 2001:69–70,
83–90, 126–27; Posey 1984; Herrera 1992.
Bluffs as preferred sites: Denevan 1996.
More than half are trees: Clement 1998 (80 percent); 1999a:199. I am grateful to
Dr. Clement for sending me copies of his work.
Uses of peach palm: Interviews, Clement; Mora-Urpí, Weber, and Clement 1997
(“only their wives,” quoted on 19); Clement and Mora-Urpí 1987 (yield); Denevan
2001:77 (saws).
Domestication of peach palm: Clement 1995, 1992, 1988.
Agricultural regression and fallows forests: Balée 2003 (“These old forests,”
282); 1994.
Anthropogenic forests: Interviews, Balée, Clement, Erickson, Nigel Smith, Stahl,
Woods; Balée 1998; 1989 (11.8 percent, 14); Erickson 1999 (I am grateful to Prof.
Erickson for sending me a copy of this paper); Smith 1995; Stahl 2002,1996.
342

“Gift from the past”: I have lifted this phrase from the title of Petersen, Neves,
and Heckenberger 2001.
Terra preta: Much of what follows below is taken from the excellent Lehmann
et al. eds. 2003; Glaser and Woods eds. 2004; and Petersen, Neves, and Heckenberger
2001. For a popular treatment, see Mann 2002b, 2000b. Lehmann et al. argue that from a
scientific standpoint ADE (Amazonian dark earth) is a better term than terra preta. I use
terra preta to avoid acronyms.
Terra preta valued: Smith 1980:562. Smith’s fine early article on terra preta was
largely ignored on publication—“I got two reprint requests for that article,” he told me.
“Nobody was ready to hear it.”
Terra preta distribution estimates: Author’s interviews, Woods, Wim Sombroek;
Sombroek et al. 2004:130 (.1–.3 percent); Kern et al. 2004:52–53 (terra preta sites every
five kilometers along tributaries).
Maya heartland: The Maya heartland—from Petén, Guatemala, and Belize north
to southern Campeche and Quintana Roo in Mexico—covers about fifteen thousand
square miles, a third or half of which was devoted to agriculture.
Charcoal: Glaser, Guggenberger, and Zech 2004; Glaser, Lehmann, and Zech
2002. My thanks to Prof. Glaser for giving me a copy of this article.
Microbial activity: Author’s interview, Janice Theis; Theis and Suzuki 2004;
Woods and McCann 1999 (inoculation). I thank Joe McCann for giving me a copy of this
article.
Charcoal and global warming: Author’s interview, Ogawa; Okimori, Ogawa, and
Takahashi 2003.
Kayapó: Author’s interviews, Hecht; Hecht 2004 (“low-biomass,” “cool,”
362–63; “To live,” 364). I am indebted to Prof. Hecht for several fascinating discussions.
Terra preta experiments: Author’s interview, Steiner; Steiner, Teixeira, and
Zech 2004.
Río Negro site: Author’s interviews, Bartone, Neves, Petersen; Heckenberger,
Petersen, and Neves 2004, 1999.
Timing of terra preta at plantation: Neves et al. 2004:table 9.2.
Xingu and black earth: Heckenberger et al. 2003 (“regional plan,” “bridges,”
1711; “built environment,” 1713). For criticism, see Meggers 2003.
Santarém terra preta: Interviews, Woods, Sombroek; author’s visit; Kern et al.
2004.
Meggers reaction: Meggers 2001 (“without restraint,” 305; “accomplices,” 322).
A response appears in Heckenberger, Petersen, and Neves 2001.
“rev up”: DeBoer, Kintigh, and Rostoker 2001:327.
“Rather than adapt”: I swipe this phrase from Erickson 2004 (“Native
Amazonians did not adapt to nature, but rather they created the world that they wanted
through human creativity, technology and engineering, and cultural institutions,” 456).
10 / The Artificial Wilderness
“all the trees”: Columbus 1963:84. I discovered this quotation, and the ideas
around it, in Crosby 2003:3–16, 1986:9–12 (knitting together Pangaea).
Invention of Columbian Exchange: McNeill 2003:xiv.
Kudzu: Blaustein 2001; Kinbacher 2000.
343

A thousand kudzus everywhere: Crosby 1986:154–56 (spinach, mint, peach,
endive, clover), 161 (Darwin), 191 (Jamestown, Garcilaso).
Cod and sea urchins: Jackson et al. 2001.
Keystone species: Wilson 1992:401.
“widowed land”: Chapter title in Jennings 1975.
Passenger pigeons: Schorger 1955 (vomiting, 35; rain of droppings, 54; huge
roostings, 10–15, 77–89; excommunication, 51; one out of four, 205).
Muir and pigeons: Muir 1997:78–82.
Audubon and pigeons: Audubon 1871 (vol. 5):115.
Seneca and pigeon: Harris 1903:449–51.
“living, pulsing”: French 1919:1.
Leopold and monument: Leopold 1968.
Mast competition, lack of passenger pigeons: Interview, Neumann, Woods;
Neumann 2002:158–64, 169–72; Herrmann and Woods 2003 (I thank Prof. Woods for
giving me a copy of this paper).
Seton’s estimate: Seton 1929 (vol. 3):654–56. See, in general, Krech 1999:chap.
5.
Lott’s and other modern estimates of abundance: Lott 2002:69–76 (“primitive
America,” 76); Flores 1997; 1991 (“perhaps” twenty-eight to thirty million, 471); Weber
2001 (“more likely” twenty to forty-four million). Shaw (1995) and Geist (1998)
suggested the number should be ten to fifteen million.
Inka tree farms: Daniel W. Gade, pers. comm.
De Soto never saw bison: Crosby 1986:213.
La Salle’s buffalo: Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):765.
“post-Columbian abundance”: Geist 1998:62–63.
Elk begin to appear: Kay 1995.
California: Preston 2002 (Drake, 129).
“The virgin forest”: Pyne 1982:46–47. See also, Jennings 1975:30.
“artificial wilderness”: I borrow the phrase from Callicott and Nelson eds.
1998:11.
More “forest primeval” in nineteenth century: Denevan 1992a:377–81 (“pristine
myth” article).
Cronon, academic brouhaha: Cronon 1995a, 1995b; Soulé and Lease eds. 1995;
Callicott and Nelson eds. 1998 (“Euro-American men,” 2). An abridged version of
Cronon 1996b appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, 13 Aug. 1995.
Making gardens: Janzen 1998.
Creating future environments: I have borrowed the phrase and the thought from
McCann 1999a:3.
11 / The Great Law of Peace
Nabokov in New York: Boyd 1991:11–12.
Early history of Haudenosaunee, Deganawidah story: Fenton 1998; Snow
1994:58–65; Hertzberg 1966.
Rules of operation: Tooker 1988:312–17. The basic source is Morgan 1901:77ff.
Checks and balances: Grinde 1992:235–40; Tehanetorens 1971 (“especially
important,” sec. 93; impeachment grounds and procedures, secs. 19–25, 39 (“warnings,”
344

sec. 19); rights of individuals and nations, secs. 93–98). A modern translation is online at
http://www.iroquoisdemocracy.pdx.edu/html/greatlaw.htm.
“they will not conclude”: Williams 1936:201.
Iroquois women: Wagner 2001; Parker 1911:252–53 (“Does the modern
American woman [who] is a petitioner before man, pleading for her political rights, ever
stop to consider that the red woman that lived in New York state five hundred years ago,
had far more political rights and enjoyed a much wider liberty than the twentieth century
woman of civilization?”). I thank Robert Crease for helping me obtain this source.
Underwood’s estimate: cited in Johansen 1995:62.
Condolence Canes: Barreiro and Cornelius eds. 1991; Fenton 1983.
Age of council: Mann and Fields 1997. See also, Johansen 1995.
Haudenosaunee as second oldest: Some of the Swiss cantons have continuously
functioning parliaments that are older, too. But I did not include them because the
individual cantons seem more comparable to the individual nations of Haudenosaunee
than to the league as a whole.
Great Law as inspiration: Grinde and Johansen 1991; Grinde 1977; Johansen
1987; Wright 1992:94 (“Their whole”).
Differences between Constitution and Great Law: Venables 1992:74–124
(Adams’s reminiscences, 108).
Franklin: Johansen 1987:40–42.
Indian freedoms: Josephy ed. 1993:29.
“Every man”: Quoted in Venables 1992:235.
“such absolute”: Colden 1747:100.
Perrot, Hennepin, Jesuit on Indian liberty: Quoted in Jaenen 1976:88 (Jesuit), 89
(Perrot), 92 (Hennepin).
Lahontan: Lahontan 1703 (vol. 2):8.
Montaigne: Montaigne 1991:233.
Greater attractiveness of native lives: Axtell 1975; Wilson 1999:67 (fleeing
Jamestown). Axtell’s conclusions were sharply critiqued in Vaughan and Richter 1980;
Axtell’s response (1981:351) was convincing, at least to me. See also Calloway 1986;
Treckel and Axtell 1976.
Pilgrims dismayed by renegades: Salisbury 1982:128–33.
“When an Indian”: Quoted in Axtell 1975:57.
“troubled the power elite”: Jaenen 1976:95.
Appendixes
“I abhor”: Quoted at http://www.russellmeans.com/russell.htm.
Insulting names: This is a separate issue from the use of Indian references on
geographical features and U.S. sports teams, some of which have long annoyed Indians.
Various efforts have been made to ban the use of “squaw,” for example, as in Squaw
Valley, home of a big ski resort in California, on the grounds that the word is a vulgar
term for the vagina used to demean native women. Most linguists do not believe this is
true. Still, the use of specific terms for the women of an ethnic group rings oddly these
days—one can’t imagine a resort called Jewess or Negress Valley. Redskin, as in the
Washington Redskins, the football team of the U.S. capital, also seems unhappily
anachronistic. According to the team, the name is intended to celebrate Indians’ warrior
345

spirit, a good quality, and is therefore not derogatory. But it seems like calling a dance
troupe the New York Pickaninnies and saying the name is intended to extol African
Americans’ innate sense of rhythm, a good quality.
“snowshoe,” “people who”: Goddard 1984; Mailhot 1978.
Crosby on civilization: Crosby 2002:71. See also, Wright 2005:32–33.
“‘Tribe’ and ‘chiefdom’”: Kehoe 2002:245.
Khipu: For a brief overview, see Mann 2003.
“resembles a mop”: Joseph 1992:28.
Governor consults khipu: Collapiña, Supno et al. 1921.
Khipu are banned: Urton 2003:22, 49.
Locke and Mead on khipu: Mead 1923 (“the mystery”, n.p.). Locke (1923:32)
shared Mead’s view: “The evidence is intrinsically against the supposition that the quipu
was a conventional scheme of writing” (italics in original). For another early attempt at
decipherment, see Nordenskiöld 1979.
“Inka had no writing”: Fagan 1991:50.
Aschers’ work: Interview, R. Ascher (“clearly non-numerical”); Ascher and
Ascher 1997:87 (“rapidly developing”).
Urton and khipu writing: Urton 2003.
Breakdown of khipu meaning units: Urton 2003:chaps. 2–5 (“system of coding
information…binary code,” 1; comparison with Sumer, Maya, Egypt, 117–18).
Khipu placename deciphered: Urton and Brezine 2005.
Miccinelli documents: Laurencich-Minelli 2001; Laurencich-Minelli et al. 1998,
1995; Zoppi 2000.
Tentative decipherment: Urton 2001.
Charles VIII and European syphilis epidemic: Baker and Armelagos 1988:708.
“lyen in fire”: Quoted in Crosby 2003:125–26.
Darwinian predictions about diseases: Ewald 1996:chap. 3. More precisely,
nonvectorborne microorganisms evolve toward moderate malignity.
Díaz and Las Casas: Williams, Rice, and Lacayo 1927:690 (“origin”). My thanks
to June Kinoshita for helping me obtain this article. On the origin of syphilis, Las Casas
was unequivocal: “From the beginning, two things did and do afflict the Spanish on this
island [Hispaniola]: the first is the sickness of the bubas [pustules], which in Italy is
called the French disease. And I know for the truth that it came from this island or from
when the first Indians came here, when Admiral Christopher Columbus returned with the
news of the discovery of the Indies, which I saw in Seville, and they were stuck rotting in
Spain, infecting the air or some other route, or else there were some Spanish with the
disease among the first returnees to Castille.” Las Casas also says the epidemic began
during the war in Naples (Las Casas 1992 [vol. 6]:361–62).
Recent syphilis findings: Rothschild and Rothschild 2000 (Colorado); 1996 (U.S.
and Ecuador); Rothschild et al. 2000b (Caribbean). See also, Rogan and Lentz 1994,
cited in Arriaza 1995:78.
Evidence for early European syphilis: E.g., Pearson 1924 (suggesting that Bruce’s
recently excavated skeleton and deathmask support a diagnosis of syphilis, rather than
leprosy); Power 1992 (I am grateful to Robert Crease for making it possible for me to
obtain this source); Stirland 1995:109–15. News reports indicate that other such skeletons
exist, too, though some have not yet appeared in the scholarly literature (e.g., Studd 2001;
346

Barr 2000). In the past, though, few of “the numerous cases of pre-Columbian Old World
syphilis…have withstood reexamination” (Baker and Armelagos 1988:710).
Universal presence of syphilis: Hudson 1965a, 1965b.
Confusion with Hansen’s disease: Baker and Armelagos 1988:706–07.
Historians’ motives: Crosby, “Preface to the 2003 Edition,” in 2003b:xix.
347

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405

MAP CREDITS
Map designs by Nick Springer, Springer Cartographics. Maps on chapter 2, 3, and
5 by Timothy William Gibson and author; maps on chapter 1, 4, 6-10 and frontispiece by
the author.
Chapter 1:
data from Diehl, 1983; Martin and Grube, 2000; Flannery and Marcus, 2000,
2003; MacEwan, Barreto, and Neves, 2001; Heckenberger et al., 2003; Pärssinen, 2003;
Denevan pers. comm.; Erickson pers. comm.; Petersen pers. comm.; Woods pers. comm.
Chapter 2 Map-1,
Chapter 2 Map-2:
after Salisbury, 1982; Vaughan, 1995; Plimoth Plantation Education Dept.
Chapter 3:
after Hyslop, 1984; Moseley, 2001; Pärssinen, 2003
Chapter 3:
data from Rowe, 1946; Moseley, 2001; D’Altroy, 2002; Pärssinen, 2003
Chapter 4:
data from Berdan and Anawalt, 1997; Townsend, 2000; Pollard, 2003
Chapter 5:
after Haynes, 1964
Chapter 6:
after Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz, 2004
Chapter 7:
data from Flores, 1974; Bernal, 1969; Coe, 1994, 1999; Martin and Grube, 2000;
Flannery and Marcus, 2000, 2003; Pohl, Pope, and von Nagy, 2002; FAMSI, n.d.
Chapter 7:
after Owen and Goldstein, 2001; Stanish, 2003
Chapter 8:
data from Brown, 1992; Saunders et al., 1997; Petersen pers. comm.; Woods pers.
comm.; U.S. National Park Service, n.d.
Chapter 8:
after Fowler, 1997
Chapter 8:
data from Martin and Grube, 1996, 2000; Guenter, 2003; Fahsen, 2003
Chapter 9:
after Denevan, 1996; MacEwan, Barreto, and Neves, 2001; Heckenberger et al.,
2003
Chapter 10:
data from Doolittle, 2000; Denevan, 2001; Whitmore and Turner, 2001;
MacEwan, Barreto, and Neves, 2001; Denevan pers. comm.; Petersen pers. comm.; Pyne
pers. comm.; Roosevelt, pers. comm.; Woods pers. comm. (The author is extremely
grateful to Steven Pyne, Jim Petersen, Bill Woods, and especially William Denevan for
putting aside their entirely justified misgivings and helping him with this map.)
406

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
(*) Image digitally altered by author, usually to remove dust, scratches and
bleed-through
Chapter 1
(t) Martti Pärssinen, University of Helsinki; (b) Clark L. Erickson, University of
Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (*)
Chapter 2,
Chapter 3,
Chapter 6 Photo-1,
Chapter 6 Photo-2,
Chapter 7 Photo-1,
Chapter 7 Photo-2,
Chapter 7 Photo-3,
Chapter 10,
Appendix D Author’s collection
Chapter 2
(t) Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (hereafter LOC),
Reproduction No. LC-USZ62-53338; (b) LOC, Reproduction No. LC-USZ62-54015
Chapter 2
LOC, Reproduction No: LC-USZ62-54018
Chapter 3 Photo-1,
Chapter 3 Photo-2
Julia Chambi and Teo Allain Chambi, Archivo Fotográfico Martín Chambi,
Cusco, Peru
Chapter 3
LOC, Reproduction No. LC-USZ62-97754
Chapter 3
Royal Library, Copenhagen, facsimile with transcription from Guamán Poma
Web site, www.kb.dk/elib/mss/poma (*)
Chapter 3
Rutahsa Adventures, www.rutahsa.com (photo by Ric Finch)
Chapter 4,
Chapter 6 Photo-1,
Chapter 6 Photo-2,
Chapter 6 Photo-3,
Chapter 8 (t),
Chapter 9
Peter Menzel, www.menzelphoto.com
Chapter 4
Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City (painting by Miguel
Covarrubias)
Chapter 4
(t) Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Mex. 385 (Codex Telleriano-Remensis,
folio 45v.) (*); (b) Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M. (Fray Bernardino
de Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, vol. 4, book 12, plate 114)
407

Chapter 5
Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Photo N25826; (r) Smithsonian American
Art Museum, Washington, D.C. / Art Resource, N.Y. (Painting by Nicholas R. Brewer
[1857-1949])
Chapter 5
National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter NAA),
Photo MNH 31,213
Chapter 5
Pete Bostrom, Lithic Casting Lab (*)
Chapter 5
University Photo Center, University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz.
Chapter 5
Vanderbilt University (photo by Steve Green)
Chapter 6
Proyecto Arqueológico Norte Chico
Chapter 7
National Geographic Image Collection (photo by Mathew W. Stirling)
Chapter 7
Joyce Marcus, University of Michigan (originally printed in Marcus 1976) (*)
Chapter 7
Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections (Codex
Zouche-Nuttall, 1902, facsimile, original at British Museum)
Chapter 7
Paul Harmon, QalaYampu Project, www.reedboat.org
Chapter 7
Library, American Museum of Natural History (hereafter AMNH), Neg. no.
334876 (photo by Shippee-Johnson Expedition)
Chapter 7
AMNH, Neg. no. 334611 (photo by Shippee-Johnson Expedition)
Chapter 8
University of Pennsylvania Museum, Tikal Project Neg. No. 64-5-29, Vessel
10E-52
Chapter 8
Southeast Archaeological Center, National Park Service (painting by Martin Pate)
Chapter 8
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site ([t] painting by Lloyd K. Townsend; [b]
painting by Michael Hampshire)
Chapter 8
(b) Courtesy Gabriel González Maury, www.campeche.com
Chapter 8
James Porter (*)
Chapter 8
Justin Kerr
Chapter 9
Araquém Alcântara
Chapter 9
408

NAA, Photo Lot 83-15
Chapter 9
Academic Press
Chapter 9
Anna C. Roosevelt
Chapter 9
(l) Museum of World Culture, Göteborg, Sweden (photo by Hakan Berg); (r)
Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia da Universidade de São Paulo (photo by Wagner
Souza e Silva)
Chapter 10
(r, l) Harris H. Wilder Papers, Smith College Archives, Smith College
Chapter 10
AMNH, Neg. no. 334717 (photo by Shippee-Johnson Expedition)
409

CHARLES C. MANN
1491
Charles C. Mann is a correspondent for Science and The Atlantic Monthly, and
has cowritten four previous books, including Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered
Species and The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century
Physics. A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he has won awards from the
American Bar Association, the Margaret Sanger Foundation, the American Institute of
Physics, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, among others. His writing was twice
selected for both The Best American Science Writing and The Best American Science and
Nature Writing. He lives with his wife and their children in Amherst, Massachusetts.
410

ALSO BY CHARLES C. MANN
@ Large: The Strange Case of the World’s Biggest Internet Invasion (1997)
(with David H. Freedman)
Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species (1995) (with Mark L.
Plummer)
The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine and 100 Years of Rampant Competition
(1993) (with Mark L. Plummer)
The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics
(1987) (with Robert P. Crease)
411

ACCLAIM FOR CHARLES C. MANN’S
1491
A Time Magazine • Boston Globe • Salon • San Jose Mercury News
Discover Magazine • San Francisco Chronicle • USA Today
New York Sun • Times Literary Supplement • New York Times
Best Book of the Year
“A journalistic masterpiece: lively, engaging…. A wonderfully provocative and
informative book.”
—The New York Review of Books
“Provocative…. A Jared Diamond–like volley that challenges prevailing thinking
about global development. Mann has chronicled an important shift in our vision of world
development, one our young children could end up studying in their textbooks when they
reach junior high.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Engagingly written and utterly absorbing…. Exciting and entertaining…. Mann
has produced a book that’s part detective story, part epic and part tragedy. He has taken
on a vast topic: thousands of years, two huge continents and cultures that range from
great urban complexes to small clusters of villages, a diversity so rich that our shorthand
word for the people who inhabited the Americas—Indians—has never seemed more
inadequate or inaccurate.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“Marvelous…. A revelation…. Our concept of pure wilderness untouched by
grubby human hands must now be jettisoned.”
—The New York Sun
“Mann does not present his thesis as an argument for unrestrained development. It
is an argument, though, for human management of natural lands and against what he calls
the ‘ecological nihilism’ of insisting that forests be wholly untouched.”
—The Seattle Times
“A must-read survey course of pre-Columbian history—current, meticulously
researched, distilling volumes into single chapters to give general readers a broad view of
412

the subject.”
—The Providence Journal
“Eminently evenhanded and engaging…. Mann’s colorful commentary sets the
right tone: scholarly but hip.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“Concise and brilliantly entertaining…. Reminiscent of John McPhee’s eloquence
with scientific detail and Jared Diamond’s paradigm-shifting ambition…. Makes me
think of history in a new way.”
—Jim Rossi, Los Angeles Times
“Engrossing…. Sift[s] adroitly through the accumulating evidence and the
academic disputes. 1491 should be required reading in all high school and university
world history courses.”
—Foreign Affairs
“An excellent bit of missionary work in relieving the general ignorance in the
West about these once-great American cultures…. Mann has a facility for translating
academese into laymen’s language and for writing about scientific complexities with a
light hand…. There is, incidentally, nothing of political correctness in this book other
than a recognition of the sensitivity of the issues.”
—Literary Review
“Monumental…. 1491 is less a self-contained work per se and more an induction
ceremony into what, for many readers, promises to be a lifelong obsession with the
startling new perspective slowly opening up on this prehistory. What’s most shocking
about 1491 is the feeling it induces of waking up from a long dream and slowly realizing
just how thoroughly one has been duped…. Mann slips in so many fresh, new
interpretations of American history that it all adds up to a deeply subversive work.”
“Well-researched and racily written…. Entertainingly readable, universally
accessible…. There are few better introductory books on the civilizations of
pre-Columbian America, and none so up-to-date”
—Salon
—The Spectator
“[A] triumph…. A fascinating, unconventional account of Indian life in the
Americas prior to 1492.”
413

414
—BusinessWeek

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2006
Copyright © 2005, 2006 by Charles C. Mann
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,
Toronto. Originally published in slightly different form in hardcover in the United States
by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2005.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this book have appeared in different forms in The Atlantic Monthly,
Harvard Design Magazine, Journal of the Southwest, The New York Times, and Science.
Insert credits (clockwise left to right): Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan © Peter
Menzel/menzelphoto.com; Central Cahokia circa AD 1150–1200 (detail) by Lloyd K.
Townsend courtesy of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site; photograph of chicha seller in
Cuzco (detail), 1921, by Martín Chambi courtesy of Julia Chambi and Teo Allain
Chambi, Archivo Fotográfico Martín Chambi, Cusco, Peru; Community Life at Cahokia
(detail) by Michael Hampshire courtesy of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site; Ruins in
Machu Picchu © Peter Menzel/menzelphoto.com; The Grolier Codex (detail), photograph
© Justin Kerr; reed boat (detail) © Paul Harmon, Qala Yampu Project,
www.reedboat.org; photograph of Inka ruin Wiñay Wayna (detail) by Martín Chambi
courtesy of Julia Chambi and Teo Allain Chambi, Archivo Fotográfico Martín Chambi,
Cusco, Peru; Landrace maize from Oaxaca (detail) © Peter Menzel/menzelphoto.com;
sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of smallpox (detail) from the Historia General de las
Cosas de Nueva España, vol. 4, book 12, plate 114 by Fray Bernardino de
Sahagún/Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: 1491: new
revelations of the Americas before Columbus / Charles C. Mann.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Indians—Origin. 2. Indians—History. 3. Indians—Antiquities. 4.
America—Antiquities.
I. Title.
E61.m266 2005
970.01'1—dc22 2004061547
Author photograph © J.D. Sloan
415

www.vintagebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-27818-0
v3.0
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
List of Maps
Preface
INTRODUCTION / Holmberg’s Mistake
1. A View from Above
PART ONE / Numbers from Nowhere?
2. Why Billington Survived
3. In the Land of Four Quarters
4. Frequently Asked Questions
PART TWO / Very Old Bones
5. Pleistocene Wars
6. Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part I)
7. Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part II
PART THREE / Landscape with Figures
8. Made in America
9. Amazonia
10. The Artificial Wilderness
CODA
11. The Great Law of Peace
Afterword to the Vintage Edition
Appendixes
A. Loaded Words
B. Talking Knots
C. The Syphilis Exception
416

D. Calendar Math
Notes
Bibliography
Map Credits
Illustration Credits
Acknowledgments
Charles C. Mann 1491
Also by Charles C. Mann
Acclaim for Charles C. Mann’s 1491
Copyright
417

418

419